Wounded three times during the Civil War—once when a bullet passed right through his neck—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. lived long enough to chat with Franklin Roosevelt just days after his inauguration. Henry and William James were close friends (Holmes was a pallbearer at the latter’s funeral); so too was Louis Brandeis. Alger Hiss served as one of Holmes’s many young law clerks. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes to the Supreme Court, where he served for three decades, after having sat on Massachusetts’s highest court for 20 years. A prolific correspondent, he wrote thousands of letters and, as a judge, nearly 2,000 opinions and dissents, many of which remain famous.
Wounded three times during the Civil War—once when a bullet passed right through his neck—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. lived long enough to chat with Franklin Roosevelt just days after his inauguration. Henry and William James were close friends (Holmes was a pallbearer at the latter’s funeral); so too was Louis Brandeis. Alger Hiss served as one of Holmes’s many young law clerks. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes to the Supreme Court, where he served for three decades, after having sat on Massachusetts’s highest court for 20 years. A prolific correspondent, he wrote thousands of letters and, as a judge, nearly 2,000 opinions and dissents, many of which remain famous.
Yet despite his public persona and ample social skills, Holmes has always been a difficult subject for biographers. He was a very private man, and toward the end of his life he burned a good number of his letters and implored friends to do the same. Eventually he agreed to let Felix Frankfurter write a posthumous biography, which was then stymied by Frankfurter’s appointment to the Supreme Court. (Holmes retired from the court in 1932, at age 90, and died in 1935, just two days before his 94th birthday.) Frankfurter assigned the task to Mark DeWolfe Howe, one of Holmes’s former law clerks, whose father wrote a biography of Holmes’s father. But Howe never completed it; by the time of his own death in 1967, he had published only the first two volumes in a projected series, taking Holmes as far as 1882 and his appointment to the Massachusetts high court.
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