“In this illuminating biography . . . [Brown] freshens the worn-out chronicle of postwar Upper West Side intelligentsia by re-telling it from Hofstadter’s playful, eternally skeptical, oddly uninflammatory point of view. . . . Above all, Brown helps readers assess Hofstadter as a member of a generation of American historians every bit as important as (and in some respects more so than) the well-known Progressive generation of Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington.”—Sean Wilentz,