The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portraitof George Washington's life and career--from his military years through his two terms as president.

Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington's private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis's artful narration, we look inside Washington's marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia's plantation society.

We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. " Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill.

He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. In the pantheon of our republic's founders, there were many outstanding individuals. " Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates.

From the Hardcover edition.