Nevins wrote more than 50 books, mainly political and business history and biography of the 19th century, in addition to his many newspaper and academic articles. The subjects of his biographies include
Grover Cleveland, Abram Hewitt, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, John C. Frémont, Herbert Lehman, John D. Rockefeller, and
Henry White. The biographies provide in-depth coverage of United States political, economic and diplomatic history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In most cases (Fish, Cleveland, Ford) they remain unequalled.
Nevins' greatest work was
Ordeal of the Union (1947-71), an 8-volume comprehensive history of the coming of the Civil war, and the war itself. It remains the most detailed political, economic and military narrative of the era.
Nevins' biography of Grover Cleveland won the 1933
Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. He also added significantly to the scholarship on President Cleveland by publishing a volume of Cleveland's correspondence from 1850-1908.
His biographer
http://books.google.com/books%3Fq%3DNevins,%2BAllan.%2BThe%2BOrdeal%2Bof%2Bthe%2BUnion%2B%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a&lpg=PA3&pg=PA4&sig=WgqRejgKEde-TDuHlrESGAB_96c'>explains the Nevins style:
Nevins used narrative not only to tell a story but to propound moral lessons. It was not his inclination to deal in intellectual concepts or theories, like many academic scholars. He preferred emphasizing practical notions about the importance of national unity, principled leadership, liberal politics, enlightened journalism, the social responsibility of business and industry, and scientific and technical progress that added to the cultural improvement of humanity.
Nevins wrote several books on John D. and the Rockefeller family, said business journalist Ferdinand Lundberg:
:It was in the course of doing work for the five Rockefeller books that Nevins developed the interesting thesis that the American corporate adventurers to whom Matthew Josephson gave the enduring name of ‘The Robber Barons’ were in fact American heroes, builders of the American civilization and democracy. He invited other historians to follow in his footsteps in this thesis, but so far nobody has conspicuously accepted. And if anyone does, one will be able to see the American intellectual horizon further muddled. I have given writers like Nevins the sobriquet of ‘counter-savants’. A savant, or man of learning, is devoted to increasing knowledge. And knowledge has the function of deepening understanding. A counter-savant, however, is a man of knowledge who uses his knowledge, for reasons known only to himself, to obfuscate understanding, to confuse readers. The fact is that Nevins’ corrective portrait of Rockefeller is not only false with respect to the central character, but frustrates understanding with the unsophisticated reader. (
The Rockefeller Syndrome, New York: Lyle Stuart, 1975, p. 145.)
