When Henri Troyat's Tolstoy was first published in America in 1967, the acclaim it received was like unto that which has long been lavished on War and Peace. For example, Webster Schott, in a Life magazine review, declared: "The book reads with the authority of history, the movement and grace of a classic novel. Tolstoy's work is his monument. Troyat's biography is his life lived again." And Troyat's biography of the great Russian novelist lives again in a paperback edition recently published by Harmony Books [$6.95]. The role of Associated Press reporter Lorena A. Hickok in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt has been the subject of some controversy in recent months, a controversy provoked by the publication of some of their correspondence unearthed among the Roosevelt archives at Hyde Park. The controversy itself, one involving charges of lesbianism, is no more likely to be resolved than that involving the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Nevertheless, readers wishing to gain some insight into how journalist Hickok viewed her relationship with Mrs. FDR can do so by purchasing a new Dodd, Mead hard-back edition of Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady, which was originally published shortly before Mrs. Roosevelt's death in 1962 [$8.95]. The late Flannery O'Connor was as prolific in her correspondence as she was polished in her fiction; and a collection of her letters, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published in 1979, was hailed by Wall Street Journal critic Edmund Fuller as "one of the major books of the year." That major work has now been reissued as a Vintage Book [$6.95]. By any standard, the James family of New York has to be one of America's most extraordinary families: Henry, Sr. , one of the most controversial writers on politics and religion in the 19th century; one son, William, perhaps the nation's best-known philosopher; another son, Henry, novelist par excellence; and daughter, Alice, compiler of a brilliant journal. In 1947, one of America's most extraordinary critics, F. O. Matthiessen, produced "a group biography" of The James Family. A new edition of this biography has also been published by Vintage Books [$7.95]. Among frontier American historians, three rank as foremost: Frederick Jackson Turner, Herbert Eugene Bolton, and Walter Prescott Webb. Three excellent essays on Turner, Bolton, and Webb, written, respectively, by Wilbur R. Jacobs, John W. Caughey, and Joe B. Frantz, were delivered at a 1963 meeting of the Western History Association and published two years later by the University of Washington Press. Entitled Turner, Bolton, and Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier, the book has now been reprinted in paper-back by Washington [$4.95]. Washington has also published a paperback edition of Jacob Korg's George Gissing: A Critical Biography, a life of the Victorian writer who attempted to "turn misery into art" through his observations of the wretched living conditions in London's notorious East End [$6.95]. Ohio University Press is offering a paperback edition of Bettina L. Knapp's Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision, which the Saturday Review described as a "penetrating study" of the French actor-director-writer often called "father of the Theater of Cruelty" [$5.95].