To the reader who inherited Jefferson the phrase-maker—and wants the man who also knew how to move people, survive a party fight, and keep the republic alive — this is for you.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham**
#1 New York Times bestseller. Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer.
Gordon S. Wood called it “probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.”
Meacham’s Jefferson is not only the author of the Declaration. He is the politician and president: a man who hated confrontation and still understood power and human nature well enough to move men, marshal ideas, learn from his mistakes, and prevail.
Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s gift was that he could do both at once. That, for Meacham, is the art of power.
The book gives the personal Jefferson—appetite, family, science, architecture, Monticello, Paris—and the public one: the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, partisan war, economic strain, and external threat. Drawn from archives in the United States, England, and France, and from unpublished presidential papers.
Buy links
- Amazon (paperback):
amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-…
- Amazon (hardcover):
amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-…
- Amazon (Kindle ebook):
amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-…
- Author site:
jonmeacham.com
About the author
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer (*American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House*). His other books include *Franklin and Winston*, *Destiny and Power*, *The Soul of America*, and *And There Was Light*. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and a contributing writer for *The New York Times Book Review*.