The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder

Review by Joseph Epstein in the March 1990 issue of Commentary

Jobs that other men should have felt pleased to have achieved at the culmination of their careers, Robert Hutchins had as a young man—by current reckoning, as hardly more than a boy. In 1927, at the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed dean of the Yale Law School; in 1929, at the age of thirty, he was made president of the University of Chicago. ...

How it came about that Hutchins was offered such jobs so early has long been something of a mystery, at least to me. That mystery has now been cleared up by a full-scale biography, Unseasonable Truths: A Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins by Harry S. Ashmore,1 a friend and, in his last few decades, close colleague of Hutchins."

(via Jay Gold)