Since World War II, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., has been perhaps the nation's most widely known and controversial historian. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, and several of his books have generated high sales and attracted considerable attention. He has also gained a wide audience by writing for popular magazines and newspapers. As a testimony to his status as a celebrity, he has been the subject of a Playboy interview, and his face has appeared on the cover of Time.

Schlesinger's fame and the controversies surrounding him, of course, have derived as much from his political activities as from his best-selling historical writings. He has conscientiously acted in accordance with his often-expressed conviction that the intellectual has a serious responsibility to participate in and influence political life. A founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1940s, he later served as...