The most important thing about a magazine—as we observed here recently and as history will bear out—is its authors. Most of ours are not only writers for magazines but also men and women who write books, the ultimate goal of historians. In A MERICAN H ERITAGE we capture them, so to speak, on their way. Very frequently articles assigned by this magazine turn into books, as did Gerald Carson’s about the cereal kings of Battle Creek, or Joe McCarthy’s piece on the great New England storm of 1938 ( Hurricane ), or Robert Alberts’ article on H. J. Heinz, or our own E. M. Halliday’s article about American soldiers fighting in North Russia in the aftermath of World War I, later published as The Ignorant Armies . Similarly, our former editor David McCullough developed his magazine article on the Johnstown Flood into a book; his latest work, The Great Bridge , on the building of the first and most famous span between New York and Brooklyn, has been receiving reviews that are enthusiastic to a degree rare in the book trade these days.

The list just cited could be extended endlessly; it should certainly include books whose authors we have come to know very well and printed regularly as their work progressed. One of the most notable of these, certainly, is Francis Russell, whose discoveries about the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the private life of President Harding we have shared with readers of this magazine. And there are our book excerpts, one to an issue and sometimes more, an attempt to keep our readers au courant with forthcoming books of importance in the enormous field of American history. Sometimes they are relatively obscure works that might otherwise be missed in the avalanche published every year (like “The New Teacher” in this issue), but just as often they are headlinecatching books by such writers as Barbara Tuchman (on General Stilwell) and Walter Lord (recently, on the War of 1812). General Lindbergh, John Kenneth GaIbraith, Henry Steele Commager, Bruce Catton, James MacGregor Burns, Morris Bishop—all stop by in our pages on their way to the bookstalls.

What spurs us into this discussion is the arrival on our desk of blurbs from Little, Brown and Company, of Boston, announcing completion of the four-volume biography of George Washington by James Thomas Flexner. It is an ambitious, movingly written, and fascinating study, notable in these days of task-force history as the product of one man’s labors. It is exceptional also for being the only extensive work on Washington in a century that the author has lived to finish, and it took twelve years. (He was seen, alive and frisky, as this went to press.)

Consultation with our index reveals that this magazine has published no fewer than a record eight excerpts from Mr. Flexner’s four volumes. How does it feel to finish a