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Book Review
| Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. By David S. Brown. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxiv, 291 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-226-07640-7.)
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| As the twentieth century recedes behind us, professional historians and other intellectuals are starting to assess the roles played by the most prominent of the midcentury historians. David S. Brown, with this very intelligent and welcome intellectual biography of the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, adds to a slowly growing list of these works. |
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Hofstadter acknowledged that his aim was more than simply to compile professional works of scholarship. From the beginning of his career, Brown shows, he wanted to write trade books both for the money and for the wider audience he would reach, and, even after he began his career at the University of Maryland, he actively considered a career in journalism. He claimed to be "as much, maybe more, of an essayist than an historian" and believed that "people like Edmund Wilson had much more influence on my style" than did any of his professional peers (pp. 48–49). With such wide ambitions and talents it is little wonder that he made such a lasting impression on the culture. |
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