"This is going to be the Jeffersonit will endure as one of the imperishable monuments of biographyand take note that I don't say 'American biography,' I say biography period."Gerald W. Johnson

This is the first volume of distinguished historian Dumas Malone's Pulitzer Prize-winning six-volume work on the life and times of Thomas Jefferson. Based on vast sources, it covers Jefferson's ancestry, youth, education, and legal career; his marriage and the building of Monticello; the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Notes on Virginia; his rich, fruitful legislative career; his highly controversial governorship; and his early services to the development of the West.