Washington: The Indispensable Man
Joseph Hirsh (jacket illustration of the author) Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1974. Book Club Edition. Second Printing. Stated]. Hardcover. xvii, [1], 423, [5] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. No DJ present. Boards somewhat worn and soiled. Pencil underlining and marginal marks. James Thomas Flexner (January 13, 1908 – February 13, 2003) was an American historian and biographer best known for the four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award in Biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. His one-volume abridgment, Washington: the Indispensable Man (1974) was the basis of two television miniseries, George Washington (1984) and George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (1986), starring Barry Bostwick as Washington. In 1929, Flexner graduated cum laude from Harvard University, and found work as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1931, he took a position at the New York City Department of Health. The following year, he left his job to devote his full energies to writing about American history. He wrote other historical biographies, including The Young Hamilton (on Alexander Hamilton), Mohawk Baronet (on Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John André. He wrote many books on the history of American art, including a highly regarded life of the American painter John Singleton Copley. He and his father, Simon Flexner, M.D., co-wrote William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (1941). (His uncle, Abraham Flexner, was the educator whose 1910 report led to the reform of United States medical schools.). After more than two decades, this dramatic and concise single-volume distillation of James Thomas Flexner's definitive four-volume biography "George Washington," which received a Pulitzer Prize citation and a National Book Award for the fourth volume, has itself become an American classic. This masterful work explores the Father of Our Country - sometimes an unpopular hero, a man of great contradictions, but always a towering historical figure, who remains, as Flexner writes in these pages, "a fallible human being made of flesh and blood and spirit - not a statue of marble and wood... a great and good man." The author unflinchingly paints a portrait of Washington: slave owner, brave leader, man of passion, reluctant politician, and fierce general. His complex character and career are neither glorified nor vilified here; rather, Flexner sets up a brilliant counterpoint between Washington's public and private lives and gives us a challenging look at the man who has become as much a national symbol as the American flag. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Thomas Jefferson, American Revolution, Continental Army, Federalists, Martha Washington, James Madison, George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton
ISBN: 0316286052
[Book #28026]
Price: $27.50