American Sphinx

'If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.'--James Parton 1874. With this quote, Ellis begins the biography that won him the 1996 National Book Award. As his myth has grown and prospered, our third president has become the darling of many, and often warring, interest groups. What would Jefferson say today about taxes, about civil rights, abortion? Nobody knows. Hence the title. Susan O'Malley's straight-forward reading is clear and forceful, if unexceptional. Why was a woman chosen to read a book by a man, about a man? This is unclear, but then it has often gone the other way. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

February 3, 1997
Penetrating Jefferson's placid, elegant facade, this extraordinary biography brings the sage of Monticello down to earth without either condemning or idolizing him. Jefferson saw the American Revolution as the opening shot in a global struggle destined to sweep over the world, and his political outlook, in Ellis's judgment, was more radical than liberal. A Francophile, an obsessive letter-writer, a tongue-tied public speaker, a sentimental soul who placed women on a pedestal and sobbed for weeks after his wife's death, Jefferson saw himself as a yeoman farmer but was actually a heavily indebted, slaveholding Virginia planter. His retreat from his early anti-slavery advocacy to a position of silence and procrastination reflected his conviction that whites and blacks were inherently different and could not live together in harmony, maintains Mount Holyoke historian Ellis, biographer of John Adams (Passionate Sage). Jefferson clung to idyllic visions, embracing, for example, the "Saxon myth," the utterly groundless theory that the earliest migrants from England came to America at their own expense, making a total break with the mother country. His romantic idealism, exemplified by his view of the American West as endlessly renewable, was consonant with future generations' political innocence, their youthful hopes and illusions, making our third president, in Ellis's shrewd psychological portrait, a progenitor of the American Dream. History Book Club selection.