The elder Henry James once said to Oliver Wendell Holmes, "You are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew." Holmes replied, "I am, I am! From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive, I'm alive!" Holmes's zest for life provided him with his greatest subject. His works are largely autobiographical in nature, especially The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860), and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872). In these essays Holmes crystallized a voice in conversation with boarders, family, friends, and fellow Bostonians. A doctor who practiced medicine as a young man and taught anatomy at Harvard for more than thirty-five years, Holmes was also a poet, essayist, and novelist as well as a member of the Saturday Club, a group of the Boston literary elite including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also named...