First published 2016
Thomas Jefferson emerges from these pages not as the familiar enigma of American history, but as a man whose contradictions follow recognizable human patterns. Gordon-Reed and co-author Peter S. Onuf trace Jefferson's development from his Virginia origins through his Paris years to his final decades, revealing how he saw himself as a patriarch in the biblical sense. The authors show how Jefferson's self-image encompassed both his public family at Monticello and his private one, both his role as founding father and slaveholder. They examine his intellectual formation, his relationship to Christianity, and his views on race and slavery. Rather than dismissing Jefferson as unknowable or condemning him as a hypocrite, the book presents a figure whose complexity mirrors our own. Through careful analysis of Jefferson's own writings, Gordon-Reed and Onuf offer readers a Jefferson who was neither saint nor villain, but a gifted man shaped by his time and circumstances, whose internal contradictions reveal as much about American democracy as his celebrated ideals.
Genres: biography, history, 20th-century, non-fiction, 21st-century, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Paris, Virginia
Period: 19th-century, 20th-century, 21st-century
400 pages · Hardcover · Liveright