In January 1962, when Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August was released. The New Yorker noted that it was one of the few books ever heralded by three consecutive full-page ads in the same issue of the Sunday Times Books Review. The book itself was no anticlimax; quickly greeted with critical acclaim, it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. But Tuchman's dramatic account of the opening weeks of the First World War achieved an even more astonishing feat for a history book-in eight months it sold over 270,000 copies, and by October, The New Yorker could report that the book had already seen 33 weeks of best-sellerdom Tuchman appeared to have done the impossible she had made pure history sell.

Tuchman has always been an anomaly in the field of historical scholarship. Although she never earned a Ph.D and did not write her first book until she was nearly 45, the historian has received two Pulitzer prizes as well as plaudits from scholars around the world. Unlike most historians who generally publish variations on a theme, the subjects of her books have ranged from ancient Palestine to medieval Europe and 20th-century China. Finally, her books have been uniformly successful--and several have been massive best sellers.

One frequently proffered explanation for the Tuchman magic is her unique style. In a time when history as a discipline is becoming increasingly quantified and scientific, Tuchman has led a single-handed crusade for a humanistic approach "Prefabricated systems make me suspicious and science applied to history makes me wince, "Tuchman told the Radcliffe chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1963. Quoting Leon Trotsky, she added "Cause in history refracts itself through a natural selection of accidents."

Rebelling against the "systematizes," Tuchman has instead spread a vision of the historian as artist, and advocated history for its own sake. "Is it necessary to insist on a purpose" Tuchman wrote in 1965.

No one asks the novelist why he writes novels or the poet what is his purpose in writing poems. The lilies of the field, as I remember were not required to have a demonstrable purpose. Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all? Insistence on a purpose turns the historian into a prophet--and that is another profession.

In an interview conducted last week when Tuchman was in Cambridge to deliver the Atherton lecture, the historian suggested a second reason for her runaway success--an explanation which reveals another dimension to Tuchman's histories, as well as the evolution her work has undergone. That explanation is her use of history as a "distant mirror"--a historic parallel of 20-th century problems.

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On August 10, 1914, at the age of two, Tuchman stood on the deck on an Italian liner, and watched two German warships exchange shots with the British cruiser Gloucester on the horizon. The ships soon disappeared, but, as Emerson wrote on another historic occasion, the shots echoed round the world. Although neither Tuchman nor the other passengers knew it at the time, they had just witnessed the opening battle of World War I.

This sea skirmish eventually reappeared in Tuchman's The Guns of August. The scene is perhaps the closest she ever comes to merging her personal experiences and her writing, and the convergence is strangely appropriate. For though Tuchman scarcely remembers the event, those shots--and others fired later that day--fundamentally shaped her life and work. As Tuchman her self observes. "That's when the 20th century really began."

And, though history is Tuchman's medium, the current century is her philosophic obsession. Born into a world of hope and self-confidence, she watched the idealism of the 19th century dissolve in war and recongeal into the recrimination and self doubt of the 20th. In contrast to the proud and noble self-image of the Victorian man, "our self-image looks more like Woody Allen or a character from Samuel Beckett," Tuchman declared in her 1980 Jefferson lecture. "It is a paradox of our time in the West that never have so many people been so relatively well off and never has society been more troubled."

On a personal level, Tuchman's early years gave her a first-hand view of this 20th-century disillusionment by bringing her time and time again into contact with the forces and events that shaped the century.

Graduating from Radcliffe in 1933, Tuchman went to work at the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a liberal organization which included members from all the countries rimming the Pacific. After a one-year stint in New York, Tuchman transferred to the organization's Tokyo branch, where she helped prepare an economic handbook of the Pacific. "The Japanese militarist/fascist movement was getting very hot and IPR wanted to encourage the liberal Japanese who were still holding on," the historian recalls. The situation looked bleak, however, and in 1935. Tuchman came home--via the trans-Siberian rail-road.

Taking the trans-Siberian across Stalin's Russia in 1935 was a tense and dreary experience. Thousands were dying of famine and purges and the country was wracked by economic and social chaos. Anxious to hide as much as possible from their foreign travelers. Soviet officials stopped the train at Baiku on the excuse that a log had fallen across the tracks--and held it there for 12 hours. "The result," Tuchman recalls, "was that we hit every station thereafter in the middle of the night--and didn't see anything."

Tuchman got her only sense of the country from a fierce argument with a Siberian schoolteacher she met on the train. The woman had taught her self English, the two got into a "terrific argument" about "who was better known, Stalin or FDR." As Tuchman recalls, "She thought the Soviets had invented everything--including neon lights."

Returning to New York, Tuchman worked for The Nation for two years, then in 1937 left for Spain to do several stories on the Spanish Civil War. On the trip, Tuchman travelled with Hemingway, his female companion and another male journalist. Tuchman grins slightly as she recalls that Hemingway's companion was very annoyed at her because "there were only two staterooms--and it wasn't proper for me to stay in the same room with either of the men!"