The road to Monticello : the life and mind of Thomas Jefferson
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Bibliographic Information
The road to Monticello : the life and mind of Thomas Jefferson
（Oxford paperbacks）
Oxford University Press, 2012, c2008
- : pbk
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"First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2012"--T.p. verso
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer, a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.
In The Road to Monticello, Kevin J. Hayes fills this important gap by offering a lively account of Jefferson's intellectual development, focusing on the books that exerted the most profound influence on his writing and thinking. Moving chronologically through Jefferson's life, Hayes reveals the full range and depth of Jefferson's literary passions, from the popular "small books" sold by traveling chapmen, such as The History of Fortunatas and The History of Tom Thumb
that enthralled him as a child, to his lifelong love of Aesop's Fables and Robinson Crusoe, his engagement with Horace, Ovid, Virgil and other writers of classical antiquity, and his deep affinity with the melancholy verse of Ossian, the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior-poet. Drawing on Jefferson's letters, journals,
and commonplace books, Hayes offers a wealth of new scholarship on the literary culture of colonial America, identifies previously unknown books held in Jefferson's libraries, reconstructs Jefferson's investigations of such different fields of knowledge as law, history, philosophy, and natural science and, most importantly, lays bare the ideas which informed the thinking of America's first great intellectual.
"The world's leading expert on the book culture of early America, Kevin J. Hayes brings an unsurpassed knowledge and sensitivity to the story of Thomas Jefferson's life of the mind.... The Road to Monticello is intellectual biography in the grand manner."
-Leo Lemay, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Professor, University of Delaware
"In what will surely be the definitive work on the subject, Hayes presents a scrupulously researched examination of the reading habits and thinking of our third President, effectively a biography of Thomas Jefferson's intellect over the course of his life."
-Library Journal
Table of Contents
- Book I: The Education of Thomas Jefferson
- 1. Fire!
- 2. A Boy and His Books
- 3. A Correct, Classical Scholar
- 4. William and Mary
- 5. The Williamsburg Circle
- 6. The Limits of English Law
- 7. A Shelf of Notebooks
- 8. Becoming a Burgess
- Book II: Family and Nation
- 9. Domestic Life and Literary Pursuits
- 10. Rude Bard of the North
- 11. A Summary View of the Rights of British America
- 12. The Pen and the Tomahawk
- 13. The Declaration of Independence
- 14. The Book Culture of Philadelphia and Williamsburg,
- Contrasted
- 15. Of Law and Learning
- 16. Lines of Communication
- 17. Notes on the State of Virginia
- 18. The Narrow House
- 19. An American Odyssey
- Book III: Our Man in Paris
- 20. Bookman in Paris
- 21. Talking about Literature
- 22. London Town
- 23. Summer of '86
- 24. An Inquisitive Journey through France and Italy
- 25. A Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley
- 26. Last Days in Paris
- Book IV: Servant of the People
- 27. The Young Idea
- 28. The Anas
- 29. Letters from a Virginia Farmer
- 30. The Vice-President and the Printed Word
- 31. The First Inaugural Address
- 32. Wall of Separation
- 33. <"Life of Captain Lewis>"
- 34. President as Patron of Literature
- Book V: Monticello
- 35. Return to Monticello
- 36. Letters to an Old Friend
- 37. The Library of Congress
- 38. The Retirement Library
- 39. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
- 40. The Autobiography
- 41. The University of Virginia from Dream to Reality
- 42. The Life and Soul of the University
- An Essay on Sources
by "Nielsen BookData"