Holmes Reads Holmes

Starting in the Victorian Age, "Holmes" became a great name. First there was the best-selling essayist and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Then, as the 19th century turned to the 20th, his son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. rose to fame as a judge, and, almost simultaneously, Sherlock Holmes rose to fame as a detective. The careers of those three Holmeses, and their respective reputations in both literature and in law, intertwined over seven decades - from the Civil War in the 1860s to the Supreme Court during the Depression years of the 1930s - as they occasionally influenced or entertained each other, and sometimes even shared the public spotlight.