"Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" is the culmination of three decades of research and writing on Jefferson, the Republic of Letters, and questions of intimacy, body and soul, in an early American context. Fifty years after Fawn Brodie shocked the History profession with her Freudian-tinged psychobiography of Jefferson, I revisit the serious questions she posed relating to his sexual habits but with greater restraint in the use of modern cognitive psychology, and only to the extent that it can be reasonably applied to the cultural conditions of the American founding era. I emphasize Jefferson's Paris years (1784-1789) and the pivotal relationship forged with the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, whose influence previous Jefferson scholars have largely overlooked. In closely examining his personal friendships and political alliances, and his documented proneness for political vengeance, this biography adopts a tone directed at avoiding an exacerbation of the love-hate relationship Americans are still having with the legacy of Thomas Jefferson in the present day.
Andrew Burstein recently retired as the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University. His new book is Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. He is the author of eleven previous books, including The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson's Secrets, and The Original Knickerbocker (a biography of Washington Irving). He is the coauthor (with Nancy Isenberg) of Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has been a member of the AAS since 1999.