George Washington

The first American deserves a real biography, not a legend. So begins William Roscoe Thayer's pioneering 1916 portrait, one of the first major attempts to strip away the saintly mythology that had accumulated around George Washington and reveal the flesh-and-blood man beneath. Thayer tackles a peculiar problem: by the early twentieth century, Washington had become so enshrouded in myth, the cherry tree, the wooden teeth, the superhuman virtue, that the actual human being had become nearly invisible. Drawing on extensive research and a critical eye, Thayer reexamines the familiar story: Washington's Virginia upbringing, his obsessive teenage interest in surveying, his brutal education during the French and Indian War, his reluctant emergence as revolutionary leader, and the extraordinary weight he carried as commander and president. What emerges is neither a villain nor a saint, but a man of fierce will, considerable private doubt, and genuine strategic genius, a person whose greatness lay in his refusal to become a king. For readers tired of the marble statue, Thayer offers something far more valuable: the complicated, contradictory, unmistakably human figure who built a nation.