SOURCE: "The Holmes-Laski Correspondence," in The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965, pp. 78-100.

In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Wilson offers an overview of the correspondence between Laski and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The correspondence between Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski extended over nearly nineteen years—1916-35. It has been published almost in toto in two volumes, comprising sixteen hundred and fifty pages, by the Harvard University Press: Holmes-Laski Letters, under the editorship of Holmes's literary executor, Mr. Mark DeWolfe Howe, with a foreword by Mr. Justice Frankfurter. Mr. Howe has supplied careful notes that identify, wherever possible, the innumerable authors and books discussed by the two correspondents, and has added a biographical appendix that gives somewhat fuller accounts of the more important persons mentioned. There is a complete, an ideal index, that runs to a hundred...