American Sphinx

At different times Thomas Jefferson has been claimed by Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists, New Deal liberals and neo-conservatives. Now the historian Joseph J. Ellis restores our most elusive national icon to human dimensions with insight, sympathy, and superb style. In American Sphinx, he sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship. Following his subject from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character.