In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman brings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden gorgeous blaze of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; the two peace conferences in The Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaurès was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended.

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912-1989), American historian, was born in New York City and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933. She won the Pulitzer Prize for history twice, for The Guns of August (1962), and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971).