Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. — who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, the great doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. — set out to make his mark on the world by the age of forty. His first notoriety among the legal community came when he edited the monumental work of legal scholarship Kent s Commentaries. Just shy of his fortieth birthday, he delivered The Common Law to very positive reviews. From that point, his career was meteoric and included a near three-decade tenure on the Supreme Court of the United States.