Joseph Ellis - Presidential Biographies

Presidential Biographies

Together with histories of the founding of the republic, since 1993 Ellis has written biographies about individual early presidents and, in 2010, a joint biography of John and Abigail Adams. Interested in how men shaped and were shaped by their times, he writes with a novelist's emphasis on character. Ellis is notable as a respected scholar whose work has also gained popular success; his biography of Jefferson and work on the Founding Fathers have been bestsellers, attaining sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. In 2004, the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of him: "Ellis doubtless is now the most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period, and thus probably the most influential as well -- at least among the general public..."

Read more about this topic:  Joseph Ellis

Famous quotes containing the words presidential and/or biographies:

    Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at the same time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch’s biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)