Ethan Allen: His Life and Times - Hardcover

Randall, Willard Sterne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393076652 ISBN 13: 9780393076653

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation from Paine to Madison.

On May 10, 1775, in the storm-tossed hours after midnight, Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary firebrand, was poised for attack. With only two boatloads of his scraggly band of Vermont volunteers having made it across the wind-whipped waters of Lake Champlain, he was waiting for the rest of his Green Mountain boys to arrive. But with the protective darkness quickly fading, Allen determined that he hold off no longer.

While Ethan Allen, a canonical hero of the American Revolution, has always been defined by his daring, predawn attack on the British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga, Willard Sterne Randall, the author of Benedict Arnold, now challenges our conventional understanding of this largely unexamined Founding Father. Widening the scope of his inquiry beyond the Revolutionary War, Randall traces Allen’s beginning back to his modest origins in Connecticut, where he was born in 1738. Largely self-educated, emerging from a relatively impoverished background, Allen demonstrated his deeply rebellious nature early on through his attraction to Deism, his dramatic defense of smallpox vaccinations, and his early support of separation of church and state.

Chronicling Allen’s upward struggle from precocious, if not unruly, adolescent to commander of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution, Randall unlocks a trove of new source material, particularly evident in his gripping portrait of Allen as a British prisoner-of-war. While the biography reacquaints readers with the familiar details of Allen’s life―his capture during the aborted American invasion of Canada, his philosophical works that influenced Thomas Paine, his seminal role in gaining Vermont statehood, his stirring funeral in 1789―Randall documents that so much of what we know of Allen is mere myth, historical folklore that people have handed down, as if Allen were Paul Bunyan.

As Randall reveals, Ethan Allen, a so-called Robin Hood in the eyes of his dispossessed Green Mountain settlers, aggrandized, and unabashedly so, the holdings of his own family, a fact that is glossed over in previous accounts, embellishing his own best-selling prisoner-of-war narrative as well. He emerges not only as a public-spirited leader but as a self-interested individual, often no less rapacious than his archenemies, the New York land barons of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys.

As John E. Ferling comments, “Randall has stripped away the myths to provide as accurate an account of Allen’s life as will ever be written.” The keen insights that he produces shed new light, not only on this most enigmatic of Founding Fathers, but on today’s descendants of the Green Mountain Boys, whose own political disenfranchisement resonates now more than ever. 16 pages of illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Willard Sterne Randall is the author of A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin and His Son, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor, Thomas Jefferson: A Life, George Washington, A Life, Alexander Hamilton, A Life and Ethan Allen: His Life and Times. Randall is a retired professor of history at Champlain College, holds as permanent appointment as Visiting Professor of History at John Cabot University in Rome. He co-authored American Lives and  Forgotten Americans with his wife, the poet Nancy Nahra.Six times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, he received the Award of Merit from the American Revolution Round Table, only awarded three times in its 50-year history. As an investigative reporter,  in a 17-year journalism career in Philaddelphia he received the National Magazine Award for Public Service from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, the Hillman Prize, the Loeb Award and the John Hancock Awardfor Excellence in Business Writing before undertaking graduate studies in history at Princeton University and writing biography. He resides in Burlington, Vermont.

Review:

“Starred Review. The definitive biography of the frontier hero and founder of Vermont....Authoritative, vivid.... Colorful, well-written and nuanced.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“This is the first biography of Ethan Allen in half a century, and the only one to render him a psychologically complicated, fully flawed hero of the American Revolution.”
- Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers and American Sphinx

“Willard Sterne Randall has few equals as a writer. A careful and meticulous historian, and an esteemed biographer, Randall has marshaled his many talents to produce the definite biography of Ethan Allen, one of the most fascinating figures in the founding of the American nation.... a must read.”
- John Ferling, author of Independence

“This is the powerful story about an essential and little-understood figure in American history. Willard Randall writes with grace and insight, and Ethan Allen is an engaging biography.”
- Jon Meacham, author of American Lion

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393076652
• ISBN 13: 9780393076653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640