Showing Thomas Jefferson: A Life by Willard Sterne Randall

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 University, Willard Sterne Randall calls on his experience and skills as an investigative journalist to unearth new material and to challenge long-held assumptions about the thoughts, motives, and work of the author of the Declaration of Independence. New light is shed on Jefferson's legal career, his views of slavery, various Revolutionary and diplomatic intrigues, as well as matters of the heart. The unsettling controversy among scholars over evidence against his character - concerning in particular his relations with his slave Sally Hemings - is traced back to its source, the allegations of James Callender.

In these lively pages we learn why Jefferson, an aristocrat in personal tastes, put his trust in the uneducated (and rural) common man and why he feared the rise of an industrial state. Not least among Randall's considerable achievements in this remarkably complete biography is that he has given readers the real flesh-and-blood Jefferson in a single, riveting volume.