Thomas Jefferson
An Intimate History
5 October 2010
Description
A seminal biography of Thomas Jefferson and a fascinating exploration of his relationship with Sally Hemings.
With a novelist’s skill and a scholar’s meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with the great issues of his time: revolution, religion, power, race, and love—ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political ideas and his presidency. Far advanced for its time, Brodie’s biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave Sally Hemings. In a new introduction, Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, explores the impact of Brodie’s groundbreaking book and explains why it is still such a powerful account of one of our greatest and most elusive presidents.
Reviews
"Brilliant, provocative. . . . A biography no one interested in the man or his times should miss." — Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World
"A powerful and touching portrait. . . . Brodie has humanized Jefferson without in the least diminishing him." — Wallace Stegner, author of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
Also By: Fawn M. Brodie 
Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South
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The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton
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Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character
Paperback, 1981
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