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Summary
Summary
From the author of Alexander Hamilton , the New York Times bestselling biography that inspired the musical, comes a gripping portrait of the first president of the United States.
Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
"Truly magnificent . . . [a] well-researched, well-written and absolutely definitive biography" --Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal
"Until recently, I'd never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping biography of George Washington . . . Well, I was wrong. I can't recommend it highly enough--as history, as epic, and, not least, as entertainment." --Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
Celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation and the first president of the United States. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one volume biography of George Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his adventurous early years, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow shatters forever the stereotype of George Washington as a stolid, unemotional figure and brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods.
Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash Broadway musical Hamilton has sparked new interest in the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers. In addition to Alexander Hamilton, the production also features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Aaron Burr, Lafayette, and many more.
Author Notes
Educated at Yale and Cambridge University in England, Ron Chernow is a biographer who specializes in hard-hitting exposes on historical business figures. Among Chernow's early accomplishments was his unmasking of corruption in Chinatown for New York magazine in 1973.
In the book The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award in 1990, Chernow outlines the extraordinary path of J.P. Morgan's empire and its influence on the American banking industry. Chernow is also the author of Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, which chronicles the life and times of the richest man in the United States in the early 1900s. His other work includes The Warburgs, The Death of a Banker, Alexander Hamilton, Washington: A Life, and Grant.
Chernow is regular guest on the National Public Radio programs Fresh Air with Terry Gross and All Things Considered.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An unabridged edition of Chernow's acclaimed biography of America's patriarch, on its face may not seem an obvious selection for general audiobook listeners who are not avid history buffs, but Scott Brick's talented performance makes the hours fly by. As Chernow chips away at larger-than-life myths while exploring the practical qualities that shaped Washington's success, Brick provides compelling vocal inflection in portraying the narrative's many personal and political dramas. Some of the most emotionally powerful renderings include the passages related to Washington's struggles with the issue of slavery and the experiences of daily life in the slave community on his plantations and in the family household. Brick's reading of the later sections of the book focused on the depth of animosity between Washington and Thomas Jefferson also pack an especially effective bite. A Penguin Press hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With so much that can be said and said positively about this magisterial biography, it is difficult not to write a review as long as the book itself. Given the distinction of the author, who wrote, among other single and collective biographies, the glowingly reviewed Alexander Hamilton (2004), readers can safely assume from the outset that what lies ahead of them is a vastly enlightening, overwhelmingly engaging treatment of a great man. The subject of the book needs only, by way of identification, the one word that Chernow uses as his title: Washington. Another book on Washington? is a question rendered pointless by this one, which happens to be the author's masterpiece. Definitive Washington is the point and effect of this biography. Our first president is thought of as more marble statue than living, hurting, loving human; however, Chernow's Washington stands not in the opposite corner as hot-blooded and animated. Washington spent a lifetime practicing control of his passions and emotions; his innate virtues, undenied and even celebrated here, were sharpened and focused by the man's suppression of a natural volatility. His gift of silence and of inspired simplicity, as the author so aptly terms Washington's strongest suits, supported his consequent leadership as general and as president.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GEORGE WASHINGTON'S corpse was scarcely a month in its grave when an enterprising minister from Maryland named Mason Locke Weems made a pitch to a Philadelphia publisher. "I've got something to whisper in your lug," Weems wrote in January 1800. "Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. ... My plan! I give his history, sufficiently minute" and "go on to show that his unparalleled rise & elevation were due to his Great Virtues." Weems was on to something. His sentimental and often fictional biography became a best seller, the first in a seemingly endless stream of studies of the man who led the Continental Army to victory in the American War for Independence and who as the first president of the United States did more than anyone else to establish the legitimacy of a national government merely outlined in the Constitution of 1787. Today, books about Washington continue to appear at such an astonishing rate that the publication of Ron Chernow's prompts the inevitable question: Why another one? An obvious answer is that Chernow is no ordinary writer. Like his popular biographies of John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton, his "Washington" while long, is vivid and well paced. If Chernow's sense of historical context is sometimes superficial, his understanding of psychology is acute and his portraits of individuals memorable. Most readers will finish this book feeling as if they have actually spent time with human beings. Given Chernow's considerable literary talent and the continued hunger of some Americans for a steady diet of tales of Washington and his exploits, what publisher could resist the prospect of adding "Washington: A Life" to its list? A more complicated answer lies in considering why we still long for news of Washington. To be sure, his life reflected, if it didn't epitomize, the once unimaginable transformation of several British colonies into an imperial Republic whose dominion extended to the Mississippi River. But Chernow and, I suspect, most of his readers are less interested in how the United States became the United States than in how George Washington became George Washington. Accepting the inevitability of our nation, they remain perplexed by the pre-eminence of this man. Chernow is far subtler and far more sophisticated than Weems. Yet there is a familiar ring to his desire to "elucidate the secrets" of Washington's "uncanny ability to lead a nation" by detailing his acquisition of such "exemplary virtues" as "unerring judgment, sterling character, rectitude, steadfast patriotism, unflagging sense of duty and civic-mindedness." What, we still wonder, was the secret of his success? Contemporaries, even those rivals who deeply resented him, observed that Washington seemed to be blessed by Divine Providence - or just plain luck. How else to explain the many bullets that whizzed around but never into his body? Or his emergence from a string of catastrophic military disasters in the French and Indian War and the War for Independence with a reputation enhanced rather than ruined? Over the past two centuries, scholars have detailed more prosaic explanations of Washington's "unparalleled rise & elevation," including his acquisition of thousands of acres through fortuitous inheritance and relentless speculation; his marriage to the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis; his connection with members of the powerful Fairfax family, who became important early patrons; his struggle to master his body and his passions within the language and conventions of 18th-century Anglo-American republicanism; and most recently, his creative conflation of his personal ambition with the cause of the Republic. Chernow acknowledges all these interpretations of Washington's life. But because he tends to slide into the biographer's quicksand of identifying too closely with his subject, his particular contribution is to argue for the critical role Washington himself played in becoming George Washington. Few human beings have ever lived a life more self-conscio sly devoted to proving he merited his fame. In retrospect, Washington seems profoundly insecure. Given to dark moods and angry outbursts, especially at those who questioned his intentions, he compensated by studying rules of etiquette, mimicking successful older men, cultivating the loyalty of younger men and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to what others thought of him. Nothing was more likely to provoke his legendary rage than accusations that he was motivated by a base motive. Like many of his peers, he made a great show of resisting public office, if only to demonstrate the absence of ambition. Washington fretted at length about the performance he would give from the balcony of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan when he became president on April 30, 1789. What should he wear? How should he behave? Knowing that "the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent," he wanted to avoid acting like a king while respecting the dignity of his office and the Republic it represented. Months earlier, he had decided he ought to say something, thereby inventing the presidential Inaugural Address. In an early draft, of which only fragments survive, Washington, Chernow writes, "spent a ridiculous amount of time defending his decision to become president, as if he stood accused of some heinous crime." This prickliness rarely surfaced in public. Indeed, he tirelessly cultivated an impassive demeanor that suited to perfection his preferred role as a remote, stoic figure towering above the sordid business of ordinary politics. BUT of course George Washington was anything but an uninterested observer. He didn't just learn from events; he shaped them to his own purposes. Throughout his career he wanted the gentlemen of Virginia and then the United States to master the landscape and peoples of North America as well as their bodies and emotions. Where Thomas Jefferson spent much of his life defying power, Washington imagined using power to improve transportation, encourage education, develop commerce, establish federal authority and unite the diverse regions of the sprawling Republic into an imposing whole that transcended the sum of its parts. "The name of AMERICAN," he said, must override any local attachments. To command respect and inspire emulation throughout the world, the United States had to balance liberty with order. This breathtaking imperial vision informed virtually everything Washington did. When he decided to provide for the freedom of most of his enslaved Africans upon the death of Martha Washington, he acted in good measure out of a conviction that "nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle." Washington was concerned with his reputation and that of the nation he helped to found because he wisely understood that he could improve both through close attention to the expectations of others. But we are mistaken if we think he offered himself as a democratic example of how an ordinary person could succeed. The Washington who fashioned his public image did not believe he created the core of his character. To the contrary, his rise, he thought, served as proof that he was an extraordinary man who had always possessed exemplary talent and integrity. If he fretted about what posterity would think of him, it was probably because he doubted our willingness to acknowledge his greatness. On that score, at least, he needn't have worried. Few people have ever lived a life more self-consciously devoted to proving their fame was merited. Andrew Cayton teaches history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Choice Review
This is the best of recent Washington biographies, but it still comes up short of exposing the whole man. Although judiciously weighing in on some foibles, the book continues the hagiographic tradition. Chernow clearly depicts family life, plantation management, and slaves. Less satisfying are Washington's relationships with men of his officer corps, which are very revealing to anyone who cares to investigate this area. There are significant gaps--for example, in analysis of the politics of command, Washington's role in the French and Indian War, and the war of attrition in New Jersey (winter and spring 1777). The author is too apologetic of the few not so brilliant military decisions, such as at the Battle of Monmouth. Chernow is given to rounding off and overgeneralizing his evaluations, of which in-depth research would have afforded more sharp edges. A fertile field pertaining to Washington's great disdain for the common soldier awaits researchers. The real Washington still demands a diligent and objective biographer. Meanwhile, this large volume has enlightening moments and is entertaining. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels, general and academic. H. M. Ward emeritus, University of Richmond
Library Journal Review
In this cradle-to-grave biography of the Founding Father, notable biographer Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller) thoroughly recounts how Washington rose to prominence in the French and Indian War, parlayed that early heroism into international fame as general of the Continental army during the American Revolution, and, as America's first President, unified a young nation and shaped its government-and he offers deeper explorations of, for example, Washington's cold relationship with his mother, his heavy reliance on younger devotees such as Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette, and his contradictory actions regarding slavery. Chernow's Washington is a reluctant celebrity who perpetually tries to retire from national service but refuses to turn his back on an embryonic republican country struggling with its newfound freedom. The narrative relies heavily on Washington's papers, but Chernow also liberally cites other primary sources and previous biographies. While objective for the most part, he occasionally offers well-grounded opinions on Washington's character and political and military actions. VERDICT This broadly and deeply researched work is a major addition to Washington scholarship-every era should have its new study of him-and it should appeal to informed lay readers and undergraduates interested in stepping beyond the typical textbook treatment.-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Read "Surprising Facts About George Washington" from Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow Prelude The Portrait Artist In March 1793 Gilbert Stuart crossed the North Atlantic for the express purpose of painting President George Washington, the supreme prize of the age for any ambitious portrait artist. Though born in Rhode Island and reared in Newport, Stuart had escaped to the cosmopolitan charms of London during the war and spent eighteen years producing portraits of British and Irish grandees. Overly fond of liquor, prodigal in his spending habits, and with a giant brood of children to support, Stuart had landed in the Marshalsea Prison in Dublin, most likely for debt, just as Washington was being sworn in as first president of the United States in 1789. For the impulsive, unreliable Stuart, who left a trail of incomplete paintings and irate clients in his wake, George Washington emerged as the savior who would rescue him from insistent creditors. "When I can net a sum sufficient to take me to America, I shall be off to my native soil," he confided eagerly to a friend. "There I expect to make a fortune by Washington alone. I calculate upon making a plurality of his portraits… and if I should be fortunate, I will repay my English and Irish creditors." In a self-portrait daubed years earlier, Stuart presented himself as a restless soul, with tousled reddish-brown hair, keen blue eyes, a strongly marked nose, and a pugnacious chin. This harried, disheveled man was scarcely the sort to appeal to the immaculately formal George Washington. Once installed in New York, Stuart mapped out a path to Washington with the thoroughness of a military campaign. He stalked Washington's trusted friend Chief Justice John Jay and rendered a brilliant portrait of him, seated in the full majesty of his judicial robes. Shortly afterward Stuart had in hand the treasured letter of introduction from Jay to President Washington that would unlock the doors of the executive residence in Philadelphia, then the temporary capital. As a portraitist, the garrulous Stuart had perfected a technique to penetrate his subjects' defenses. He would disarm them with a steady stream of personal anecdotes and irreverent wit, hoping that this glib patter would coax them into self-revelation. In the taciturn George Washington, a man of granite self-control and a stranger to spontaneity, Gilbert Stuart met his match. From boyhood, Washington had struggled to master and conceal his deep emotions. When the wife of the British ambassador later told him that his face showed pleasure at his forthcoming departure from the presidency, Washington grew indignant: "You are wrong. My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!" He tried to govern his tongue as much as his face: "With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions." When Washington swept into his first session with Stuart, the artist was awestruck by the tall, commanding president. Predictably, the more Stuart tried to pry open his secretive personality, the tighter the president clamped it shut. Stuart's opening gambit backfired. "Now, sir," Stuart instructed his sitter, "you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter." To which Washington retorted drily that Mr. Stuart need not forget "who he is or who General Washington is." A master at sizing people up, Washington must have cringed at Stuart's facile bonhomie, not to mention his drinking, snuff taking, and ceaseless chatter. With Washington, trust had to be earned slowly, and he balked at instant familiarity with people. Instead of opening up with Stuart, he retreated behind his stolid mask. The scourge of artists, Washington knew how to turn himself into an impenetrable monument long before an obelisk arose in his honor in the nation's capital. As Washington sought to maintain his defenses, Stuart made the brilliant decision to capture the subtle interplay between his outward calm and his intense hidden emotions, a tension that defined the man. He spied the extraordinary force of personality lurking behind an extremely restrained facade. The mouth might be compressed, the parchment skin drawn tight over ungainly dentures, but Washington's eyes still blazed from his craggy face. In the enduring image that Stuart captured and that ended up on the one-dollar bill--a magnificent statement of Washington's moral stature and sublime, visionary nature--he also recorded something hard and suspicious in the wary eyes with their penetrating gaze and hooded lids. With the swift insight of artistic genius, Stuart grew convinced that Washington was not the placid and composed figure he presented to the world. In the words of a mutual acquaintance, Stuart had insisted that "there are features in [Washington's] face totally different from what he ever observed in that of any other human being; the sockets of the eyes, for instance, are larger than he ever met with before, and the upper part of the nose broader. All his features, [Stuart] observed, were indicative of the strongest and most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forests, it was his opinion that [Washington] would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes." The acquaintance confirmed that Washington's intimates thought him "by nature a man of fierce and irritable disposition, but that, like Socrates, his judgment and great self-command have always made him appear a man of a different cast in the eyes of the world." Although many contemporaries were fooled by Washington's aura of cool command, those who knew him best shared Stuart's view of a sensitive, complex figure, full of pent-up passion. "His temper was naturally high-toned [that is, high-strung], but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it," wrote Thomas Jefferson. "If ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in wrath." John Adams concurred. "He had great self-command… but to preserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity. Whenever he lost his temper, as he did sometimes, either love or fear in those about him induced them to conceal his weakness from the world." Gouverneur Morris agreed that Washington had "the tumultuous passions which accompany greatness and frequently tarnish its luster. With them was his first contest, and his first victory was over himself… Yet those who have seen him strongly moved will bear witness that his wrath was terrible. They have seen, boiling in his bosom, passion almost too mighty for man." So adept was Washington at masking these turbulent emotions behind his fabled reserve that he ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved. He seems to lack the folksy appeal of an Abraham Lincoln, the robust vigor of a Teddy Roosevelt, or the charming finesse of a Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, George Washington has receded so much in our collective memory that he has become an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human. How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness. From a laudable desire to venerate Washington, we have sanded down the rough edges of his personality and made him difficult to grasp. He joined in this conspiracy to make himself unknowable. Where other founders gloried in their displays of intellect, Washington's strategy was the opposite: the less people knew about him, the more he thought he could accomplish. Opacity was his means of enhancing his power and influencing events. Where Franklin, Hamilton, or Adams always sparkled in print or in person, the laconic Washington had no need to flaunt his virtues or fill conversational silences. Instead, he wanted the public to know him as a public man, concerned with the public weal and transcending egotistical needs. Washington's lifelong struggle to control his emotions speaks to the issue of how he exercised leadership as a politician, a soldier, a planter, and even a slaveholder. People felt the inner force of his nature, even if they didn't exactly hear it or see it; they sensed his moods without being told. In studying his life, one is struck not only by his colossal temper but by his softer emotions: this man of deep feelings was sensitive to the delicate nuances of relationships and prone to tears as well as temper. He learned how to exploit his bottled-up emotions to exert his will and inspire and motivate people. If he aroused universal admiration, it was often accompanied by a touch of fear and anxiety. His contemporaries admired him not because he was a plaster saint or an empty uniform but because they sensed his unseen power. As the Washington scholar W. W. Abbot noted, "An important element in Washington's leadership both as a military commander and as President was his dignified, even forbidding, demeanor, his aloofness, the distance he consciously set and maintained between himself and nearly all the rest of the world."9 The goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries. By gleaning anecdotes and quotes from myriad sources, especially from hundreds of eyewitness accounts, I have tried to make him vivid and immediate, rather than the lifeless waxwork he has become for many Americans, and thereby elucidate the secrets of his uncanny ability to lead a nation. His unerring judgment, sterling character, rectitude, steadfast patriotism, unflagging sense of duty, and civic-mindedness--these exemplary virtues were achieved only by his ability to subdue the underlying volatility of his nature and direct his entire psychological makeup to the single-minded achievement of a noble cause. A man capable of constant self-improvement, Washington grew in stature throughout his life. This growth went on subtly, at times imperceptibly, beneath the surface, making Washington the most interior of the founders. His real passions and often fiery opinions were typically confined to private letters rather than public utterances. During the Revolution and his presidency, the public Washington needed to be upbeat and inspirational, whereas the private man was often gloomy, scathing, hot-blooded, and pessimistic. For this reason, the new edition of the papers of George Washington, started in 1968 and one of the great ongoing scholarly labors of our time, has provided an extraordinary window into his mind. The indefatigable team of scholars at the University of Virginia has laid a banquet table for Washington biographers and made somewhat outmoded the monumental Washington biographies of the mid-twentieth century: the seven volumes published by Douglas Southall Freeman (1948 -- 57) and the four volumes by James T. Flexner (1965 -- 72). This book is based on a close reading of the sixty volumes of letters and diaries published so far in the new edition, supplemented by seventeen volumes from the older edition to cover the historical gaps. Never before have we had access to so much material about so many aspects of Washington's public and private lives. In recent decades, many fine short biographies of Washington have appeared as well as perceptive studies of particular events, themes, or periods in his life. My intention is to produce a large-scale, one-volume, cradle-to-grave narrative that will be both dramatic and authoritative, encompassing the explosion of research in recent decades that has enriched our understanding of Washington as never before. The upshot, I hope, will be that readers, instead of having a frosty respect for Washington, will experience a visceral appreciation of this foremost American who scaled the highest peak of political greatness. Excerpted from Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
