Joseph Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize_winning author of Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their youngest son, Alex.
“Mr. Ellis gives us a succinct character study while drawing on his
extensive knowledge of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history
to strip away the accretions of myth and contemporary extemporizing
that have grown up around his subject. … Mr. Ellis refuses to judge
Washington by "our own superior standards of political and racial
justice" but instead tries to show how Washington was seen in his
day. In doing so he gives us a visceral understanding of the era in
which the first President came of age, and he shows how
Washington's thinking (about the war for independence, the shape of
the infant nation and the emerging role of the federal government)
was shaped by his own experiences as a young soldier in the French
and Indian War and as a member of the Virginia planter class. The
resulting book yields an incisive portrait of the man, not the
marble statue. . . His Excellency is a lucid, often shrewd take on
the man Mr. Ellis calls the "primus inter pares, the Foundingest
Father of them all." And it does so with admirable grace and wit.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Ellis [writes] with clarity and grace. He has a gift for reaching
a broad public with substantive books on serious subjects. In [His
Excellency], he has done it again. This is an important and
challenging work: beautifully written, lively, serious, and
engaging… He has given us a book that will inspire other research,
it will deepen our understanding of its subject.” —David Hackett
Fischer, Boston Sunday Globe
“[Ellis’s] probing biographies remain some of the most
psychologically penetrating portraits of the Founding Fathers that
we have. [His Excellency] is full of subtle inroads into the man
Ellis calls the “most notorious model of self-control in all of
American history, the original marble man.”–Richard Lacayo,
Time
“Ellis skillfully uncomplicates many convoluted subjects, including
the real and passionate Washington and the myths constructed around
him, the economic and social forces driving him and his fellow
revolutionaries…. A distinguished addition.” —Celia McGee, Daily
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