Jefferson, the Virginian (Jefferson & His Time (University of Virginia Press)): 01

Prodigiously researched and felicitously written, Dumas Malone's multi-volume Jefferson and His Time is one of the great biographies of the 20th century.

Malone is the giant on whose shoulders every subsequent scholar of Jefferson stands, and his work remains seminal in shaping our understanding of who Jefferson was. Both from a purely scholarly standpoint and outside the groves of academe, Malone's biography of Jefferson is simply a great read. There is a whole new generation of Jefferson lovers who will want to own this set.

Dumas Malone, 1892-1986, spent thirty-eight years researching and writing Jefferson and His Time. In 1975 he received the Pulitzer Prize in history for the first five volumes. From 1923 to 1929 he taught at the University of Virginia; he left there to join the Dictionary of American Biography, bringing that work to completion as editor-in-chief. Subsequently, he served for seven years as director of the Harvard University Press. After serving on the faculties of Yale and Columbia, Malone retired to the University of Virginia in 1959 as the Jefferson Foundation Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 1962. He remained at the university as biographer-in-residence and finished his Jefferson biography at the University of Virginia, where it was begun.