Stacy Schiff dazzles us again, this time with the forgotten story of an American original. In her distinctive voice, Schiff restores Samuel Adams to the pantheon of the most influential Founding Fathers on the 300th anniversary of his birth—and at a time when democracy appears especially fragile. Thomas Jefferson once asserted that if there was one leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” Without him, his cousin John said, “the true history of the American Revolution can never be written.” A humble hero, a man of sterling integrity and deep faith yet a failed businessman who was adrift for the first act of his life, Samuel Adams stands among the most successful revolutionaries of all time. But despite his celebrated status among his contemporaries, he has largely vanished from the record. Convinced that liberty and self-determination were essential rights, he led an ingenious, egalitarian campaign of civil resistance against England. Organizing boycotts and massaging the news, churning out propaganda under an army of pseudonyms—some of them newly uncovered by Schiff—Adams arguably did more to bring about independence than any other Founder.
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A NYPL Library Lion, a recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, she has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City. For more information, please visit www.stacyschiff.com
