Maverick's progress

by James Thomas Flexner

For more than sixty years, James Thomas Flexner, one of America's most distinguished men of letters, has written with distinction about American history and American art. Praised by reviewers and scholars alike, his works have garnered the most prestigious awards, including the National Book Award, a Special Pulitzer Prize, and the esteemed Gold Medal for Eminence in Biography from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite this wide acceptance of his work, Flexner entitles the story of his life Maverick's Progress; one need only read through these pages to understand why. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, Flexner worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune before taking up his career as a biographer. His first book, Doctors on Horseback, published in 1937, was an immediate success. In 1939, Flexner's America's Old Masters was hailed by a distinguished biographer as "the best book of its kind." In 1947, Flexner began what would become a three-volume s