Samuel Eliot Morison, the eminent Harvard historian, followed in the footsteps of many earlier historians who believed that history should be well written as well as accurate prose. Practicing this dictum, he produced more than forty volumes of widely read biographies and other historical narratives of unusually high literary value, as well as more than two hundred articles for learned journals and historical publications. His career was filled with many surprising contrasts. His long lifetime included elements of both stability and mobility: he resided in the same house in Boston for most of his eighty-eight years, but he also traveled extensively, visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, Morocco, Mexico, the South Pacific, Japan, and the coasts of North and South America from Labrador to the Straits of Magellan. His writing and historical research required him to spend a great deal of time in academic cloisters, but he also led a...