The late T. Harry Williams was an historian who first made his reputation as an authority on the Civil War (Lincoln and His Generals), but his magnum opus was a biography as huge and human as its subject— Huey Long, that colorful, controversial "Messiah of the Rednecks" (as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called him) who dominated Depression Louisiana, the state where Williams was to spend most of his career as a professor at Louisiana State University. Published by Knopf in 1969, Huey Long subsequently was the winner of the National Book Award in history and biography and the Pulitzer Prize in biography. A paperback edition of what The New York Times hailed as a "masterpiece of American biography" has now been published by Vintage Books [$8.95]. Vintage has also republished a biography that Time magazine considered "required reading for everyone interested in this troubled century." It is Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann and the American Century, a work which received both a National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1981 Bancroft Prize in American History [$7.95]. Another recent Vintage Book is H. L. Mencken's A Choice of Days, an abridgment of the sage of Baltimore's autobiographical works, Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, with selections ranging from Mencken's carefree childhood days in late 19th-century America to his years as the nation's foremost iconoclast [$4.95]. Perhaps no biography in the English language is more famous than James Boswell's Life of Johnson, that 18th-century classic about Samuel Johnson, whose love for London was equaled only by his passion for his native language. Boswell also wrote Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Johnson, it too recognized as a masterwork of English literature. Selections from both works were blended into a handsome one-volume cloth edition by Frank Morley, with superb full-page illustrations by E. H. Shephard (of Winnie the Pooh fame), and first published in 1930. A seventh edition was recently brought out in Great Britain by Bell & Hyman, and it is being distributed in this country by Ohio University Press [$24.95]. Another Ohio publisher, Kent State, is offering a paperback edition of Lucy Breckinridge of Grove Hill: The Journal of a Virginia Girl, 1862—1864, edited by Mary D. Robertson [$7.00]. Herman Melville was the subject of Leon Howard's highly acclaimed biography, first published in 1951, which is now available in paperback from California [$7.95]. Out in a new edition from Columbia is Raymond Williams' examination of the character and accomplishments of George Orwell [$15.00 cloth, $5.00 paper]. Harper/Colophon Books has reprinted Ross Terrill's biography Mao, which Chinese scholar John Fairbanks called "a brilliant narrative interpretation ... of China's greatest revolutionary" [$6.95].