Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Wood is the Alva O. He books have received the Pulitzer, Bancroft and John H. Gordon S. Way University Professor and professor of history at Brown University. Dunning prizes, as well as a National Book Award nomination and the New York Historical Society Prize in American History. They include Empire of Liberty: A History of the Ear

From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation, and whose subsequent falling out did much to fix its course.Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. What started as a grudging trickle of correspondence became a great flood, and a friendship was rekindled, over the course of hundreds of letters. In fact, a few hours earlier on that same day, far to the south in his home in Monticello, Jefferson died as well. Arguably no relationship in this country's history carries as much freight as that of John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jeff

This is an indispensable account of two men, of the country they built, and of why their legacies matter even now. Ellis, author of the forthcoming Then and Now: The Founders and US. "Whenever I read Gordon Wood, the dean of eighteenth century American historians, I feel as if I am absorbing wisdom at the feet of the master. Friends Divided is teeming with exceptionally acute and unvarnished insights into Thomas Jefferson and John Adams as they do battle for the nation's soul. Now he turns his intellectual honesty and clear-eyed prose to the lives of Jefferson and of Adams, giving us a brilliant portrait of their complicated relationship. Jefferson's sunny, almost Panglossian, optimism, juxtaposed with the dark, dyspeptic musings of Adams, presents readers with nothing less than a vivid composite portrait of the Amer