Junior

Harvard last week hired a new associate professor of history. He was only 28, had neither master's nor doctor's degree, and little teaching experience. But Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.'s credentials were good.

His bestselling, brilliant Age of Jackson (TIME, Oct. 22) was a likely contender for a Pulitzer Prize in history this year. And though Arthur Sr., 30 years older, has been a full professor of American history at Harvard since 1925, nobody would accuse Arthur Jr. of trading on his father's reputation.

Junior is a genial, hair-triggered young man who prepped at a Cambridge (Mass.) public school and at Exeter, flashed through Harvard summa cum laude, landed a fellowship at Cambridge University, and came back to Harvard a Junior Fellow. His senior thesis on Orestes A. Brownson, a Transcendentalist who turned Catholic, was published when he was 21, sold only 2,500 copies. With the war he went to OWI in Washington, then to OSS in the ETO, ending up as a corporal in political intelligence.

The Age of Jackson grew out of six Lowell lectures, given at Harvard when Arthur was 24. Schlesinger pounded out his first draft at 4,000-5,000 words a day, finished the book despite twins "tearing all over the place" or even "sitting on my lap." His wife, daughter of Harvard's late Physiologist Walter B. Cannon, wrote a children's book called Twins at Our House at the same time. They counted on its advance order of 6,000 copies to support his unprofitable studies--not dreaming that Jackson would sell 30,000 copies.

Young Schlesinger is now in Washington on a Guggenheim Fellowship, acting as his own legman for a new book, The Age of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hopes to pick up unpublished, unvarnished material from F.D.R.'s cronies and co-workers "before these guys die off."

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