George Washington: A Life in Books

When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally singled out as the great minds of early America.Up until the present day, George Washington has never been taken seriously as an intellectual.Indeed, John Adams once snobbishly dismissed him as "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation." Yet Adams and most of the men who knew Washington were unaware of his regular devotion to reading as a program of self-improvement.Based on an exhaustive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin J.Hayes draws on juvenilia, letters, diaries, pamphlets, and the close to 1,000 books owned by Washington to reconstruct the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of the first US president.Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt a sense of acute embarrassment about his relative lac