Jefferson and His Time
by Dumas Malone
Summary
Dumas Malone spent decades on Jefferson and His Time, a biography so large it eventually filled six volumes, following Thomas Jefferson from his Virginia upbringing and legal training through the Revolution, his diplomatic service in France, the presidency and his retirement years at Monticello. By 1975, Malone had published five of the six volumes, carrying Jefferson from his early life as a young Virginia lawyer through the end of his second presidential term in 1809, with only the final volume, covering his retirement years, still to come.
Malone treats Jefferson with evident admiration throughout, tracing his political philosophy, his central role in drafting the Declaration of Independence, his years as minister to France during the run up to the French Revolution, and the controversies of his presidency, including the Louisiana Purchase and the embargo policy that damaged American trade in his final years in office. Malone draws on Jefferson's enormous surviving correspondence and papers to reconstruct both the public statesman and the private man, a scholar who had spent time as director of Harvard University Press and editor of the Dictionary of American Biography before devoting the rest of his career to this single subject as the University of Virginia's Jefferson Foundation Professor.
Reading the biography, even in its unfinished state as of 1975, means encountering an exhaustively researched, admiring, old fashioned life and times narrative built across decades of archival work, the kind of single subject devotion few historians ever attempt. It suits a reader with the patience for a genuinely monumental biography, five volumes deep and still growing when it won its prize, rather than a compact single volume life.
Historical Context & Significance
Jefferson and His Time won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History for the biography as Malone had built it so far, five volumes published across nearly three decades, with the sixth and final volume, The Sage of Monticello, still six years from publication in 1981.
Malone, who had earlier directed Harvard University Press and edited the Dictionary of American Biography, devoted the second half of his career entirely to Jefferson as the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor. When he finished the sixth volume in 1981, the completed biography stood as one of the most thorough lives of Jefferson ever written, and it remains a standard reference for historians of the founding era despite the more admiring tone later biographies have sometimes revised.