Thomas Jefferson. A Life

Description

Though books about Thomas Jefferson could fill a small library, there has long been a need for an authoritative, single-volume biography that captures the public and private man as well as the tumultuous age in which he lived. This gracefully rendered portrait fulfills that need.Throughout the narrative, with stories of Jefferson's earliest youth in colonial Virginia to his tragic final days at Monticello, we encounter a dynamic, thoroughly modern man committed to a search for a meaningful, authentic way of life. Despite his playful brilliance, the Jefferson revealed in these pages struggles to maintain a balance between two warring personalities: the carefully controlled philosopher of the Age of Reason and the tortured romantic possessed by sudden and powerful emotions - as in his passionate affair with a British painter.In addition to the author's firsthand scholarship - here and abroad - and the ongoing literary detective work on the Jefferson papers at Princeton...