When a series of improbable political events brought Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1903, he was not the most famous person named Holmes. His own author-father and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective both merited more acclaim, and even the mass murderer known as Dr. H. H. still likely attracted more notoriety. Holmes Jr. often worried that his legal talent, for which he himself had the highest regard, would never be recognized properly. How, then, did Holmes finally become, when he was in his eighties, a much-lionized public figure? During the Progressive Era, as justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self tells the story, a group of prominent, largely Jewish intellectuals adopted Holmes; these younger men, led by Felix Frankfurter, saw him merging judicial modernism with a Victorian aristocrat's sense of noblesse oblige. Seeking legitimacy for their own reform agenda, Frankfurter and his allies used both legal journals and popular publications such as The New Republic to create the image of an enlightened Yankee from Olympus. This Holmes was not only a great legal mind but a committed progressive and a firm defender of civil liberties, particularly First Amendment freedoms. This legend always attracted doubters and dissenters, particularly from natural law jurists who equated Holmes's brand of legal positivism with totalitarianism, but Holmes never lacked for equally passionate advocates, particularly among the devotees of legal realism who praised him for recognizing that judicial decision making often demanded social policy making. For many years, however, the debate over the real Holmes had to proceed with access to his personal papers controlled by authorized biographers. Mark DeWolfe Howe, a professor at Harvard Law School who had once served as the Justice's private secretary, offered such a detailed account of Holmes's early life and legal work that two biographical volumes ended