Books: The 20-Year Dialogue

HOLMES-LASKI LETTERS (1,650 pp.)—2 Vols. edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe—Harvard ($12.50).

It all began with a simple bread & butter note that Harold J. Laski, 23, sent to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 75, one day in 1916. Laski, then an instructor in government at Harvard, assured the Great Dissenter that "you teach our generation how we may hope to live," pressed a couple of books on him, and begged permission to "write sometimes and ask you questions." In the next two decades, Briton Laski asked precious few questions of Yankee Holmes, and frequently he...

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