cover image Maverick's Progress: An Autobiography

Maverick's Progress: An Autobiography

James Thomas Flexner. Fordham University Press, $55 (510pp) ISBN 978-0-8232-1660-4

Flexner, historian, art critic, award-winning biographer of George Washington, Benedict Arnold and Alexander Hamilton, calls himself a maverick, and indeed this convivial autobiography, written with great charm and style, reveals an individualist who goes his own way. Born in 1908 in Manhattan, he learned skepticism from his father, Simon, medical scientist and first director of the Rockefeller Institute. His mother, Helen Thomas, taught composition at Bryn Mawr, where her ``domineering'' sister, M. Carey Thomas, was president. Flexner started out as a poet, then became a Herald Tribune city news reporter. In Florence, Bernard Berenson (whose wife was a first cousin of Flexner's mother) taught the young Harvard-educated historian how to scrutinize paintings. Flexner went on to write popular studies of painters Thomas Cole, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West that revitalized interest in early American art. He writes affectingly of his 45-year marriage to second wife pianist Beatrice Hudson, of the biographer's craft and of how he overcame dyslexia and obsessive phobias. Illustrated. (Feb.)