Hoftsteder

WORKS of philosophy can last for millennia, novels for centuries. Works of history, if they're really good, survive maybe a generation. But Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It is now celebrating its fiftieth year in print and remains a solid backlist seller. High school students, undergraduates, and graduate students read it, as do lay readers. Journalists grab it off the shelf when they need to pepper a column with …

…ukemia, at age fifty-four in 1970, Hofstadter had already written a lifetime's worth of lasting history. "It seems almost unkind to speak of Richard Hofstadter as a fulfilled historian -- when he was cut down so cruelly in his prime," Woodward said at the memorial service. "Yet in quantity as well as quality, in grace of style as well as in subtlety of scholarship ... the richness and abundance of his creative work proclaim a valorous fulfillment."