First Family: Abigail and John Adams - Hardcover

Ellis, Joseph J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307269620 ISBN 13: 9780307269621

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2010

Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, best-selling author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic’s tenuous early years.
John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters. Joseph J. Ellis distills this unprecedented and unsurpassed record to give us an account both intimate and panoramic; part biography, part political history, and part love story.

Ellis describes the first meeting between the two as inauspicious—John was twenty-four, Abigail just fifteen, and each was entirely unimpressed with the other. But they soon began a passionate correspondence that resulted in their marriage five years later.

Over the next decades, the couple were separated nearly as much as they were together. John’s political career took him first to Philadelphia, where he became the boldest advocate for the measures that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. Yet in order to attend the Second Continental Congress, he left his wife and children in the middle of the war zone that had by then engulfed Massachusetts. Later he was sent to Paris, where he served as a minister to the court of France alongside Benjamin Franklin. These years apart stressed the Adamses’ union almost beyond what it could bear: Abigail grew lonely, while the Adams children suffered from their father’s absence.

John was elected the nation’s first vice president, but by the time of his reelection, Abigail’s health prevented her from joining him in Philadelphia, the interim capital. She no doubt had further reservations about moving to the swamp on the Potomac when John became president, although this time he persuaded her. President Adams inherited a weak and bitterly divided country from George Washington. The political situation was perilous at best, and he needed his closest advisor by his side: “I can do nothing,” John told Abigail after his election, “without you.”

In Ellis’s rich and striking new history, John and Abigail’s relationship unfolds in the context of America’s birth as a nation.

About this title

Review:

"Written with the grace and style one expects from Ellis. . . . John Adams could not have a better biographer." --The Los Angeles Times

"Authoritative. . . . Ellis employs his narrative gifts to draw a remarkably intimate portrait of John and Abigail's marriage as it played out against the momentous events that marked the birth of a nation." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A brilliant book. . . . Provocatively interpretive, carefully researched, and gracefully written." --Providence Journal

"A stirring portrait of a marriage. First Family reminds us that in certain presidencies (FDR and Clinton spring to mind), there is no closer adviser than a brilliant spouse, improving the thoughts of her husband, often before he has even conceived them." --The Boston Globe

"Engaging. . . . Ellis does a marvelous job of capturing Abigail and John at their boldest and most vulnerable. . . . He possesses a rare understanding of human nature. In First Family, he has given us the story of a marriage worth emulating and, not least, a subtle reflection on 'the perils of parenting.'" --Chicago Tribune

"Richly detailed. . . . Erudite as well as eloquent, First Family proves that bedfellows can make superior politics." --Richmond Times-Dispatch

About the Author:

Joseph J. Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and their youngest son.

Joseph J. Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Where he lives with his wife and their youngest son.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307269620
• ISBN 13: 9780307269621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299