In 1988, Harvard University Press will publish Scale and Scope, a book that will represent the crowning achievement of one of the most productive careers of any twentieth-century American historian.' Scale and Scope is a comparative analysis of the rise of big business in three industrial economies: the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Because of the depth of its research, it is certain to become one of the classic studies of American historical scholarship. For its author, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., it will comprise a third such landmark study, the other two being Strategy and Structure (1962) and The Visible Hand (1977). Both of these earlier works won the Thomas Newcomen Award, given for the best book on the history of business published during the preceding three years. In addition, The Visible Hand received the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. But more important than any prizes, Chandler has influenced a generation of scholars in many countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Belgium; and in several disciplines, among them history, economics, sociology, and business administration. For all these reasons, and as an overture to the appearance of Scale and Scope, it is timely to review Chandler's career and to trace the roots of his achievement. Taking the bare facts first, Chandler came from a patrician but not extremely wealthy family which, during his youth, moved about in the United States and Latin America. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, the University of North Carolina (where he took an M.A. after his five years of Navy duty during World War II), and Harvard University (where he completed his Ph.D. in history in 1952). His career as a working historian has been spent primarily in three institutions: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1950-1963), the Johns Hopkins University (1963-1971), and the Harvard Business School (1971-present). Since 1946, when his first published article appeared, Chandler has written four major books, coauthored a fifth, edited and compiled nine other books, written thirty-two articles and twenty-six chapters plus scores of book reviews, and has been assistant editor or editor-in-chief of ten volumes of presidential papers-four on Theodore Roosevelt, six on Dwight D.