The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (
The New York Times
)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Guns of August
During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In
The Proud Tower,
Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close.
The Guns of August,
and
The Zimmermann Telegram
comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era.