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Allan Nevins at Eighty
 

LOUIS M. STARR
 

A LLAN NEVINS attained the age of eighty this year, and
/A\ that in itself is enough to give a turn to a liost of people
A )\ on iMorningside and elsewhere throughout the land.
Allan Nevins an octogenarian? It is as if one woke up to peace in
Asia, or the Mets in first place, or some other unaccountable phe¬
nomenon. Perhaps it is that literary people go by their given names
unadorned—one speaks of Allan Nevins, not of Professor Nevins,
for all his years in our midst as De^Mtt Clinton Professor of Amer¬
ican History—thereby conveying an illusion of youth.

Yet there is more to it than that. Nevins calls to mind the figure
applied to Andrew White of Cornell—"a steam engine in pants."
Have we had another first rank historian who was as prolific? One
remembers Qrover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, the two-
volume Hamilton Fish, the multi-volume Ordeal of the Union,
the biographies of Fremont, of John D. Rockefeller, of Abram S.
Hewitt, of Henry White, of Herbert Lehman, the trilogy on Ford,
The Gateway to History, The Emergence of Modern America,
the Pocket History of the United States (with Henry Steele Com-
mager)-and then realizes that this represents but a fraction of his
output. Nevins the editor vies with Nevins the author: the diaries
of Philip Hone and of George Tcmplcton Strong, for example.