'It's what saved me, I think. If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled my writing capacity," Barbara Tuchman once said. She took the right path. Nothing the popular historian ever wrote smelled remotely of the lamp, as we are reminded by the Library of America's new edition of two classic Tuchman works, "The Guns of August" (1962), about the outbreak of World War I, and "The Proud Tower" (1966), about the prewar period 1890-1914.
Tuchman deserves to be better known to readers who have come of age since her death in 1989 at age 77. As a member of the New York German-Jewish aristocracy, she grew up in a family with an acute sense of history and the import of world events. Her maternal grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Her uncle, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury secretary through the Depression and World War II. Tuchman's father, Maurice Wertheim, was a successful banker but also an important art collector.
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