Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586421077 ISBN 13: 9781586421076

Publisher: Steerforth, 2006

Synopsis

While in office from 1801 to 1809, Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted into homemade scrapbooks hundreds of poems of nation – early odes to the still coalescing republic – family, and romantic love. He gave the books as gifts to his granddaughters and for nearly 200 years it was believed the girls had compiled the collections themselves. No previous biography of Jefferson has drawn on this important resource. In unexpected ways this groundbreaking work will help demystify “the American sphinx.” 243 of the poems that captured Jefferson’s imagination are published here for the first time, with essays, annotations and photographs that make this historically important and revealing volume a delight to explore.

Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks shows our third president’s taste for sentimental verse and abolitionist poems, and will modify his reputation as a strict neo-classicist. It includes a poem by Benjamin Franklin, several odes on the death of Alexander Hamilton, poems by women writers who have not been fully recovered in recent anthologies, and corrects the assumption that newspaper verse did not shape Jefferson's thinking on foreign affairs. Jefferson's interest in young American poets will surprise even his biographers who do not always include his literary tastes while in office in their studies of the man. And numerous anti-Federalist poems will correct the view of Jefferson as a reluctant politician.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Gross is a professor of English at Depaul University and a specialist in British romantic verse, with a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. He has served as a fellow at the Huntington Library and the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

Review:

"Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks is an elegantly produced and judiciously edited anthology that is sure to interest both academics and well as general readers interested in Jefferson and the history and culture of the early American republic. Jonathan Gross has done a stunning job making sense of a vast trove of texts that illuminate much about Jefferson's sensibility, his sense of taste and politics, and indeed his personal life. Each section is introduced informatively, and the appendices will enlighten all sorts of readers. This book provides the materials with which to think about Jefferson in light of popular culture, Romantic thought, and the larger relations between American and British cultures.
— Philip Gould, Professor of English, Brown University

"Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Burns are among Jefferson's major companions in a previous unrecorded ten-year conversation that will permanently change Jefferson studies. Deeply sensitive to the tensions between the exteriority of neoclassicism and the interiority of romanticism, Jonathan Gross is a masterful editor."
— Jay Fliegelman, author of Declaring Independence

"Thanks to Jonathan Gross's comprehensive annotations and introduction, the Scrapbooks offer even non-specialist readers a variety of fascinating insights into the complexity of Jefferson's inner life."
— Karl Kroeber, Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

"A dramatic glimpse into the mind of Jefferson. In these pages, he emerges as both a casual reader and a political partisan. What did he clip from the newspaper? What poetry stirred him? The cerebral president had a sense of humor and a strikingly sentimental side that can be easily gleaned from this fascinating volume."
— Andrew Burstein, author of Jefferson's Secrets

About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1586421077
• ISBN 13: 9781586421076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592
• Editor: Gross Jonathan