"Outstanding."

-Wall Street Journal

"Exhilarating to read."

-San Francisco Chronicle

"A brilliant, magisterial and gracefully narrated biography. A superlative contribution to Jeffersonian scholarship."

- Kirkus Reviews

"A fairly, thoroughly-researched, lucidly constructed biography."

- Atlantic Monthly

Although books on Thomas Jefferson could fill a small library, there has long been a need for an authoritative single-volume biography. This volume was intended to fulfill that wish. Drawing on firsthand scholarship as well as ongoing literary detective work on the Jefferson Papers at Princeton University, biographer Randall draws on his skills as an investigartive reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine and Time Magazine to unearth new material and to challenge long-held assumptions about the reasoning, motives, and works of the Sage of Monticello. Professor Randall was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for this examination of both Jefferson's inner thoughts on slavery and his alleged relations with the slave Sally Hemmings as well as his Revolutionary, political and diplomatic intrigues. The resulting biography was named one of the Ten Best Biographies of 1993 by Publishers Weekly and has become the standard one-volume source on our third President.

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