Fadiman became one of the most prominent American literary critics during the 1930s with his often caustic and insightful book reviews for the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. He also managed to reach a sizable audience through his work as a radio talk-show host from 1938 to 1948.

I hope merely to set Tolstoy's masterpiece before the reader in such a way that he will not be dismayed by its labyrinthine length or put off by its seeming remoteness from our own concerns.

War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written. These very words have been used, to my knowledge, by E. M. Forster, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, and Compton Mackenzie; and a similar judgment has been made by many others....

Let us ... try to discover together why it is a great novel.

The first thing to do is to read it. A supreme book...