'It's what saved me, I think. If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled my writing capacity," Barbara Tuchman once said. She took the right path. Nothing the popular historian ever wrote smelled remotely of the lamp, as we are reminded by the Library of America's new edition of two classic Tuchman works, "The Guns of August" (1962), about the outbreak of World War I, and "The Proud Tower" (1966), about the prewar period 1890-1914.

Tuchman deserves to be better...