Volume 25, Number 13 · August 17, 1978
The Heart of Jefferson
By Edmund S. Morgan
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
by Garry Wills
Doubleday, 398 pp., $10.00
Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence? A host of able biographers have pursued Jefferson day-by-day and have even made lurid guesses at his nights. His papers are published with the most painstaking textual analysis ever accorded an American historical figure. Every scrap relating to the Declaration of Independence has been savored like holy writ, and the document itself is probably better known than any other in our history. But Garry Wills has now given us a reading of it that may radically change our perception both of the Declaration and of its author.
Review, 4030 words
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