Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski.

EDITED BY DEWOLFE HOWE. WITH A FOREWORD BY FELIX FRANKFURTER,.

Item Number: 101451

London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

First edition of the collected correspondence between Chief Justice Holmes and economist Harold J. Laski. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles to the spine, frontispiece portrait of Holmes after a photograph of the original painting by Charles Hopkinson in 1929. In very good condition.

One of Britain's most influential intellectual spokesman for socialism in the interwar years, English political theorist, economist, and professor Harold Joseph Laski's teachings greatly inspired many aspiring leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru. He was notably the inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943). In 1949, Laski gave to the Harvard Law School the original letters which Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had written to him between 1916 and 1932, later published in the present volume. Many of Holmes's closest male friends were in England and he corresponded with them regularly and at length, speaking usually of his work. Letters to friends in England such as Laski and Frederick Pollock contain frank discussion of his decisions and his fellow justices.