Volume 15, Number 11 · December 17, 1970
The View from Jefferson's Camp
By Eric L. McKitrick
Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (Volume IV, Jefferson and his Time)
by Dumas Malone
Little, Brown, 539 pp., $10.00
Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography
by Merrill D. Peterson
Oxford, 1072 pp., $15.00
Any biographer of anyone surely has his problems. But what must they be like when his subject happens to be a historical figure of primary importance who lived an inordinately long life and who had a career that imposed itself in the most coercive way on the most critical events of his time? Obviously the story cannot be counted on to write itself. There are choices all along the way, and it matters which ones you take. But just as the career was itself coercive, so are the choices that are open in dealing with it. They are in reality more limited than might be expected, and in no case more so than in that of Thomas Jefferson. What are they?
Review, 5014 words
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