A seminal biography of Thomas Jefferson and a fascinating exploration of his relationship with Sally Hemings. With a novelist’s skill and a scholar’s meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with the great issues of his time: revolution, religion, power, race, and love―ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political ideas and his presidency. Far advanced for its time, Brodie’s biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave Sally Hemings. In a new introduction, Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello , explores the impact of Brodie’s groundbreaking book and explains why it is still such a powerful account of one of our greatest and most elusive presidents. 16 pages of illustrations "Brilliant, provocative. . . . A biography no one interested in the man or his times should miss." ― Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World "A powerful and touching portrait. . . . Brodie has humanized Jefferson without in the least diminishing him." ― Wallace Stegner, author of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian Fawn M. Brodie was professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of several noted biographies, including Thomas Jefferson and The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello , she lives in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.