Joseph J. Ellis Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Joseph Ellis shares what inspired him to follow his award winning biography of Thomas Jefferson with Founding Brothers and what kind of research went into this Book.

What made you decide to follow your award winning biography of Thomas Jefferson with Founding Brothers and what kind of research went into this book?
After I finished my last two books, on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, I realized that I had read much of the correspondence produced by the founding generation. I did have to go through the Washington letters, and read the Burr correspondence, but otherwise I had pretty much started a new book on the entire group of founders without quite knowing what I was doing. And throughout those letters, they kept referring to each other as a "band of brothers." We think of them as Founding Fathers, but they saw themselves as a fraternity. I should add that my title fails to include the one sister in the group, Abigail Adams, whom I think was an equal partner in her husband's political career.

You open the book with the sentence, "No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution." How so?
We regard the success of the American Revolution as inevitable because we have lived so long as a nation, over two hundred years, with the consequences of its success. Looking back over that stretch of ...