Not long after, [Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.]'s name came up in a speech by Leonard Jeffries, the radical black studies professor at the City College of New York. Schlesinger, he said, is "a slick and devilish and dirty and dastardly" man, his book "a devilish volume ... a political trap passing off as a scholarly document," and the people who read and talk about it a group of "pimps and prostitutes parading."

Almost by accident, a book that Schlesinger had no plans to write until he got caught up in a controversy over the New York public school curriculum has become a hit. Last week was its ninth consecutive on the New York Times bestseller list. "What miracle of levitation is keeping it there I don't know," said Schlesinger in a recent interview at his office at the graduate school of the City University of New York.

PHOTO,,Cori Wells Braun For Twp CAPTION: Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the lifelong liberal now taking the heat. CAPTION: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at the City University of New York: On the bestseller list and in the hot seat with his critique of how history in taught in America.