Marse Henry: An Autobiography, Complete

Henry Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1840, literally in the shadow of power. The son of a congressman, he came of age among the men who would shape America's destiny, witnessing the presidencies of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson before the nation tore itself apart. This is his account of that extraordinary upbringing: the religious fervor of his mother's household, his father's political machinations, and the young Watterson's own burning ambition to become both a literary master and a player in the great game of American politics. The Civil War looms over everything, casting its long shadow across a narrative that traces one man's formation in an era of unprecedented upheaval. Watterson writes with the florid, theatrical sensibility of his era, a 19th-century journalist's voice, all grand gestures and sweeping declarations. For readers who want to understand how America saw itself in the decades before the war that would define it, this is a front-row seat to the birth of a nation's anxieties and aspirations.