His Excellency: George Washington

Joseph J. Ellis

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 8, 2005 - History - 352 pages

National Bestseller

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.

 

Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.

Contents

• Interior Regions: 3
• The Strenuous Squire: 40
• First in War: 73
• Destinys Child: 110
• Testament: 241
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 277

About the author

Joseph Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize_winning author of Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their youngest son, Alex.

Bibliographic information

• Title: His Excellency: George Washington; Vintage Series
• Author: Joseph J. Ellis
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005
• ISBN: 1400032539, 9781400032532
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State; History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775); History / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)