Article: A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950.

A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 684 pp., $28.95 cloth.

First, the bad news. Autobiography is a craft fraught with hazards--the traps that await those who write about themselves. Among them are two common and especially distasteful pitfalls. First is the vulgarity of aggrandizement. Unusual is the memoir that does not indicate that its principal is the cleverest or most sagacious individual around. Such authors are never short of brilliant retroactive ripostes, never lose debates, and seldom acknowledge doing or saying anything foolish. When writing about oneself, ...

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