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The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
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By Stacy Schiff
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ONE OF LOS ANGELES TIMES TOP 5 NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The New Yorker, TIME, Oprah Daily, USA Today, New York Magazine, Air Mail, Boston Globe, and more!
"A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important.” —Ron Chernow
"A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography…Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them." —Oprah Daily
A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.
Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.
Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.
In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.
Excerpt
I
TRULY THE MAN OF THE REVOLUTION
Omissions are not accidents.
— MARIANNE MOORE
SAMUEL ADAMS delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life. It was all the more confounding after the first: he was a perfect failure until middle age. He found his footing at forty-one, when, over a dozen years, he proceeded to answer to Thomas Jefferson’s description of him as “truly the man of the Revolution.” With singular lucidity Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page, layering in the moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the popular imagination. On a wet 1774 night when a group of Massachusetts farmers settled in a tavern before the fire and, pipes in hand, discussed what had driven Bostonians mad — reasoning that Parliament might soon begin to tax horses, cows, and sheep; wondering what additional affronts could come their way; and concluding that it was better to rebel sooner rather than later — it was because the long arm of Samuel Adams had reached them. He muscled words into deeds, effecting, with various partners, a revolution that culminated, in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It was a sideways, looping, secretive business. Adams steered New Englanders where he was certain they meant, or should mean, to head, occasionally even revealing the destination along the way. As a grandson acknowledged: “Shallow men called this cunning, and wise men wisdom.” The patron saint of late bloomers, Adams proved a political genius.
His second cousin John swore that Samuel was born to sever the cord between Great Britain and America. John also believed Samuel an original; he mystified even his peers. Committed, as he termed it, to “the cool voice of impartial reason,” Samuel Adams breathed fire when fire-breathing was in order. Serene, sunny, tender, he seemed instinctively to grasp what righteous anger could accomplish. From four feckless decades he emerged intensely disciplined, an indomitable master of public opinion — a term yet to be coined. In a colony from which, as a Crown officer observed, “all the smoke, flame, and lava” erupted, Adams seemed everywhere at once. If there was a subversive committee in Massachusetts, he sat on it. If there was a subversive act, he was somewhere near or behind it. “He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects,” noted a Philadelphia colleague, unhappily. His enemies, insisted Adams, came in handy: “Our friends are either blind to our faults or not faithful enough to tell us of them.” He knew that we are governed more by our feelings than by reason; with rigorous logic, he lunged at the emotions. He made a passion of decency. He was a prudent revolutionary. Among the last of his surviving words is a warning to Thomas Paine: “Happy is he who is cautious.”
Deeply idealistic — a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders — he believed virtue the soul of democracy. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace. At the same time he was unremittingly pragmatic. Adams saw no reason why high-minded ideals should shy from underhanded tactics. Power worried him; no one ever believed he possessed too much of the stuff. His sympathies lay with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered. A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: “Rulers should have little, the people much.” And privilege should make way for genius and industry. Railing against “the odious hereditary distinction of families,” Adams fretted about vanity, foppery, and “political idolatry.” He did his best to contain himself when John Hancock — who traveled with “the pomp and retinue of an Eastern prince” — appeared in a gold-trimmed, crimson-velvet waistcoat and an embroidered white vest. In 1794, Adams was inaugurated as governor of Massachusetts. To maintain ceremonial standards, a benefactor produced a carriage. Adams directed the coachman to drive his wife to the State House, to which he proceeded, at seventy-one, on foot.
On no count did he mystify more than in his disregard for money. “I glory in being what the world calls a poor man. If my mind has ever been tinctured with envy, the rich and the great have not been its objects,” he wrote his wife of sixteen years, who hardly needed a reminder. At a precarious point she supported the family. Having dissipated a fortune, having run a business into the ground, having contracted massive debts, Adams lived on air, or on what closer inspection revealed to be the charity of friends. A rarity in an industrious, hard-driving, aspirational town, he was the only member of his Harvard class to whom no profession could be ascribed. Certainly no one turned up at the Second Continental Congress as ill-dressed as Adams, who for some weeks wore the suit in which he dove into the woods near Lexington, hours before the battle. It was shabby to begin with. Alone among America’s founders, his is a riches-to-rags story.
There was an elemental purity about the man whom Crown officers believed the greatest incendiary in the king’s dominion. Puritan simplicity never lost its appeal. Afflictions invigorated. Adams handily beat Ben Franklin at Franklin’s thirteen-point project for arriving at moral perfection. On meeting Samuel Adams in the 1770s, a foreigner marveled: It was unusual, in life or on the stage, for anyone to conform so neatly to the role he played. Here was what a republican looked like. “A man wrapped up in his object,” Adams disappeared into the part, from which it is difficult to pry him, identical as he was to his ideals.
In July 1774, newly arrived in London and reeling still from seasickness, the royal governor of Massachusetts was whisked off for a private interview with George III. For two hours Thomas Hutchinson briefed his sovereign on American affairs. The king seemed as eager to show off his knowledge as to learn what was happening in the most unruly of his American colonies. He asked about Indian extinction and the composition of New England bread. He had heard of Samuel Adams but had not grasped that he was the cause of so many royal headaches. Hutchinson revealed that Adams was “a great man of the party.” What gave him his influence? inquired the king. “A great pretended zeal for liberty, and a most inflexible natural temper,” explained Hutchinson, adding that Adams had been the first to advocate for American independence. Making the same point differently, Thomas Jefferson called Adams “the earliest, most active, and persevering man of the Revolution.” For many years it was possible to assert that he ranked with, if not above, George Washington. His fame spread alongside New England obstreperousness, which he hoped to make contagious. “Very few have fortitude enough,” he wrote, neatly summarizing his life’s work, “to tell a tyrant they are determined to be free.” Various patriots made their mark as the Samuel Adams of North Carolina, the Samuel Adams of Rhode Island, or the Samuel Adams of Georgia. “The character of your Mr. Samuel Adams runs very high here. I find many who consider him the first politician in the world,” reported a Bostonian from 1774 London. John Adams met with a hero’s welcome when he arrived in France four years later to solicit funds for the war. He hurried to clarify: He was not the renowned Mr. Adams. That was another gentleman. (No one believed him.) “Without the character of Samuel Adams,” declared John, “the true history of the American Revolution can never be written.”
And yet it was, for various reasons. Adams engaged in a delicate, dangerous business. As the font of “thoughts which breathe, and words which burn,” he was in the eyes of the British administration for years a near-outlaw, ultimately an actual outlaw. Had events turned out differently he would have been first to the gallows. Much of his work depended on plausible deniability; he covered tracks and erased fingerprints. He made no copies of his letters. (One example: Adams and Paul Revere must have been in frequent touch. Two notes between them survive.) John Adams watched helplessly in 1770s Philadelphia as his cousin fed whole handfuls of papers to the fire in his room. Was he perhaps overreacting? asked John. “Whatever becomes of me,” Samuel explained, “my friends shall never suffer by my negligence.” In the summer he had no fire; with scissors, he cut bundles of letters to shreds and scattered the confetti from the window, sparing his associates if stopping the biographer’s heart. A portion of what he did not manage to destroy met with some shameful mistreatment, of which we have only hints.1 Even a complete record would neither adequately answer the king’s question nor illuminate Adams’s tactics. He operated by stealth, melting into committees and crowd actions, pseudonyms and smoky back rooms. “There ought to be a memorial to Samuel Adams in the CIA,” quips a modern historian, dubbing him America’s first covert agent. We are left to read him in the twisted arm, the borrowed set of talking points, the indignation of America’s enemies. We know more about him from his apoplectic adversaries than from his friends, sworn to secrecy.
Unlike his contemporaries, Adams did not preen for posterity. He wrote no memoir, resisting even calls to assemble his political writings. He consigned the history to others, with predictable results, the more so as his ideas diverged from those of post-Revolutionary America, leaving him intellectually homeless. Sometimes history blossoms after the fact — where a Massachusetts boulder or a Virginia cherry tree might suddenly insert itself into the record — and sometimes it evaporates. Adams escaped the golden haze that settled around his fellow founders, as if it were too extravagant for him. He hailed from the messy, anarchic, provocative years. It would not help that he would be confused with John, who collected his letters, wrote prolifically for the record, and, since adolescence, had rehearsed for greatness.2
Adams was rare for his ability to keep a secret, any number of which he took to the grave, including the backstory of the Boston Tea Party, which he knew as well as anyone. (Dryly he noted that some individuals enjoyed every political gift except that of discretion.) He freely discussed his limitations, reminding friends that he understood nothing of military matters, commerce, or ceremony, though Congress charged him, at various times, with all three. Most of America’s founders became giants after independence. Adams began to shrink. A cloud of notoriety survives him; the fame does not. He would be minimized in any number of ways. He was called many names in his life but one thing he was never called was “Sam.” He is the sole signer of the Declaration of Independence to come down to us as an incendiary, and a beer.
A PHILADELPHIA MERCHANT who would soon sign the Declaration of Independence raved of Adams: “All good Americans should erect a statue to him in their hearts.” Two generations later, John Trumbull exhibited his massive painting of the Declaration in Boston. Thousands flocked to Faneuil Hall, crowding close to the canvas. Trumbull had aimed for “absolute authenticity” but the sublime depiction left some heads spinning. Where was Samuel Adams, who had played the central role in this illustrious history? Barely discernible in the crowd, he was upstaged by Elbridge Gerry, blotted out by Richard Henry Lee, “pilloried in a manner between the shoulders of the two gentlemen beside him.” He seemed literally to have fallen out of the picture.3 Reactions divided along party lines. Old Whigs fumed to see “their Moses thrust almost out of sight.” One suggested that Trumbull rework the painting. The character of Samuel Adams must be restored; it was unfair for laurels to be “stripped from his brows to decorate the heads of those who by his labors have glittered in the sunshine of popular applause.” Tories countered that Adams preferred the background. Trumbull had treated him as Adams treated himself. Others sputtered at the mere mention of his name.
He would make nearly as much trouble for historians as he did for the British. His biographers have turned him into a neurotic, a Socialist, a mobster. One profile consists solely of blistering contempt. Another whitewashes him to the point of anemia. Even when historians acknowledge his influence he disappears between the lines. Garry Wills identified Adams as the most influential member of the first two Continental Congresses. “Probably no American did more than Samuel Adams to bring on the revolutionary crisis,” contended Edmund Morgan. “No one took republican values as seriously as Adams did,” writes Gordon Wood. He was “the premier leader of the revolutionary movement,” “as astute a politician as ever America has produced.” All echo Thomas Hutchinson in their outsized claims — “the whole continent is ensnared by that Machiavelli of chaos,” groaned the royal governor — but the superlatives then slink off, headlines without articles, as if fearing the envy of John, the disapproval of Samuel, or the need to dislodge a man from behind over thirty pseudonyms. When he does not get enough credit, he gets too much. He single-handedly directed the Stamp Act riots and the Boston Tea Party in some accounts, the battle of Lexington in others.
Before his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson asked himself: “Is this exactly in the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams?” Would he approve of it? To understand why the new president hoped to channel Adams’s spirit is to discover not only where a daring revolutionary came from but where a revolution did. His curious career explains how the American colonies lurched from “spotlessly loyal” to “stark, staring mad” in fifteen dizzying years, how a group of drenched, pipe-smoking Massachusetts farmers, fifty miles from Boston and thousands from London, might reason that they should act sooner rather than later if they did not care to be “finessed out of their liberties.” Adams introduced them into the political system, persuading them their liberties were worth the risk of their lives. To lose sight of him is to lose sight of a man who calculated what would be required to upend an empire and who — radicalizing men, women, and children, with boycotts and pickets, street theater, invented traditions, a news service, a bit of character assassination, and any number of innovative, extralegal institutions — led American history’s seminal campaign of civil resistance.
Adams banked on the sage deliberations of a band of hard-working farmers reasoning their way toward rebellion. That was how democracy worked. He dreaded disunity. “Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction,” he warned. There was nothing feigned about his zeal for liberty, “the best cause,” he assured his wife, “that virtuous men contend for.” In his case it was bred deep in the Calvinist bone. Adams could not live in the house with a slave and arranged for the one who arrived on his doorstep to be freed. He refused to believe that prejudice and private interest would ultimately trample knowledge and benevolence. Self-government was in his view inseparable from governing the self; it demanded a certain asceticism. He wrote anthem after anthem to the qualities he believed essential to a republic — austerity, integrity, selfless public service — qualities that would become more military than civilian. The contest was never for him less than a spiritual struggle. It is impossible with Adams to determine where piety ended and politics began; the watermark of Puritanism shines through everything he wrote.4 Faith was there from the start, as was the scrappy, iconoclastic spirit, as were the daring, disruptive excursions beyond the law.
Much of the maneuvering Adams kept out of sight while practicing it in plain view. He bobs and weaves, vanishing around corners and behind Richard Henry Lee — who also believed him to be the author of the Revolution. At times Adams amounts to little more than a flicker and dash, a vapor trail. Even in his letters he seems to have one foot out the door. The clock strikes midnight; he cannot linger; he hates to leave us hanging (or so he says). He will tell us more next time. He is forever slipping from grasp, as a rider galloping from Boston late on a warm spring night is about to urge him to do again, as swiftly as possible, as if the future depended on it.
Footnotes
1 “I would mention here or elsewhere Mr. Farley’s discovery of the papers behind the wainscot,” noted Adams’s grandson, sounding like Agatha Christie. There are various allusions to letters having been lost, suppressed, or sanitized — their radicalism extracted — for posterity.
2 A Philadelphia package destined for Mrs. John Adams might be delivered in error to Mrs. Samuel Adams, leaving the first, on an afternoon visit, to envy a gift that was rightfully hers.
3 There were any number of reasons to cry foul. Fifty-six men had signed the Declaration. Forty-seven figured in the painting. Trumbull omitted individuals who had signed the document and included those who had not, two of whom had violently argued against it. When in 1818 the painting was exhibited in Carpenter’s Hall, on its way to Washington, where it hangs today in the Capitol, it did not match the room it was meant to depict. Nor does the likeness of Adams, although Trumbull painted him from the flesh. Already the Revolution had come a long way since 1776.
4 To some religion seemed a stalking horse. “Scripture is brought in to cover treason and murder,” howled a Boston customs officer in 1770.
II
A VOICE IN THE DARKNESS, A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
Everything in American affairs happens contrary to probability.
— THOMAS HUTCHINSON, 1779
A GLIMMER, a gleam, the hurry of hoofs: a sturdy, square-jawed man speeds through the night, with an urgent message, on a borrowed horse. His topcoat flaps behind him. A bright moon hangs overhead. Within days he will know he has participated in some kind of history, though he will hesitate to attach his name to it for decades and is never to know that his own account will be obliterated — the adrenaline alone enduring — by verse, leaving him trapped in tetrameter, a mythic figure, eternally jouncing his way toward Lexington.
It is just after midnight. Despite a near-encounter with a pair of British officers, Paul Revere has made excellent time. Only two hours earlier he had rushed through town to the home of the last remaining patriot leader in occupied Boston. On previous occasions Revere had stood at hand while Dr. Joseph Warren wrote out secret messages for him to carry; already in advance of this evening, Revere has devised a system. Friends await him on the north side of town, where they have hidden a boat in which to row him to Charlestown. From there, he will ride twelve miles west. He knows he has minutes before British regulars lock down Boston. He knows, too, that Warren has dispatched an earlier rider, by a longer route, with a similar message. Both speed toward Samuel Adams and John Hancock, in Lexington. What the newspapers would later term Revere’s “secret and speedy intelligence” was simple: British regiments are on the move. Adams and Hancock are their quarry. Revere gallops off to warn of imminent arrest if not outright assassination.
Minutes after he has pulled on his riding boots, British officers circulate through fetid Boston barracks to lay hands on sleeping backs, whispering to their men, in the gentlest of military awakenings. It is time to march, unwelcome news at 10:30 p.m., “a soldier’s hour to be in bed,” as one light infantryman later put it. Furtively the men file from their barracks, through rear doors, in small parties. They dodge their own sentries; in silence they pick their way through the late-night streets. The dog who opts to announce them meets with a bayonet. Regimental officers are not privy to their destination; their men know less about their expedition than does Revere. By the time some eight hundred British regulars finally assemble in east Cambridge, soaked to the waist after a long trudge through freezing marsh, stalled as they wait for the supplies that should have preceded them, word of their clandestine sortie has already reached Lexington.
Adams and Hancock had retired for the night when Revere galloped into town, which was not to say that either the messenger or his message was entirely unexpected. Two days earlier Revere had made the same ride, in daylight and at a more relaxed pace, to confer with the patriot leaders. Both had recently fled Boston, where they no longer felt safe. Adams had made a hasty exit with only the clothes on his back. Even he judged them threadbare. He fled as well without his papers, destroyed later by a fast-thinking friend. Having attended the last session of a provincial congress that Saturday, Adams and Hancock were poised to ride to Philadelphia for a more momentous gathering. The two lodged temporarily in the comfortable, clapboard Lexington parsonage, guests of the Reverend Jonas Clarke, a gregarious man, a Hancock relative, and a firm friend of American liberty. The Bostonians shared a wallpapered room on the ground floor. Hancock’s fiancée lodged above.
On the earlier visit Revere would have revealed what many in Boston had noticed: the regulars had hauled their longboats out of the harbor. General Thomas Gage had relieved his elite troops, his prized grenadiers and light infantry, from duty, ostensibly for training. The feint fooled no one. Twice already Gage’s men had ventured into the Massachusetts countryside to confiscate munitions. Twice already the countryside had known to expect them. British itineraries had surely been evaluated that Sunday at the Lexington parsonage, along with precautions. Adams had neither respect nor sympathy for Gage, whom he considered “void of a spark of humanity.” It was on the return from that ride that Revere had arranged for signals from the North Church steeple; a single lantern would indicate that the British intended to march by land. Two lights would indicate that they proceeded by boat. It was imperative that word reach the countryside even if a messenger could not; all depended on provincial readiness. We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, “is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.”
He could not have been surprised to learn that friends believed him the object of Gage’s expedition. He had made himself more obnoxious to the colonial authorities than any man in British North America. For the same reason, advertisements ran that spring for poster-sized portraits of him. For half a dollar — well below the price of a primitive brand of toothpaste — one could acquire a fine mezzotint likeness, printed in Rhode Island, of “that truly worthy patriot, S. A.” (The printer anticipated robust sales.) Panegyrics circulated, lauding Adams’s genius and predicting immortal fame. What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason. For the better part of a decade, Adams had, as General Gage saw it, churned irritations into insults, poisoning the minds of Americans, ripening them for insurrection. “I doubt whether there is a greater incendiary in the King’s dominions,” sputtered Thomas Hutchinson, the previous royal governor, whom Adams had done all in his power to sabotage; whom Gage had arrived, with four regiments, to replace; and who could never sufficiently excoriate “the black art of Adams.”
Color rushed to the Tory face at the mention of Adams’s name. So “thorough a Machiavellian,” he would stop at nothing to accomplish his ends — assumed, despite his early disavowals, to be American independence. He employed every dirty trick along the way, including, one Crown officer fumed, “such arts as an oyster wench disdains to lower her reputation to.” From the imperial descriptions, Adams can sound like Marx, Lenin, and Robespierre rolled into one. Over and over he had sent British legal authorities scrambling to review case law on treason. He distinguished himself as the most wanted man in the colonies; peace could not be restored in America until someone made an example of him. When a Tory sympathizer threw an anonymous letter into an encampment of the Boston troops, he offered up a roster of those who had instigated the Massachusetts madness. Were rebellion to break out, they should be executed. Adams topped his helpful list. Already Gage had attempted by other means to eliminate the problem that was Samuel Adams. He had sent a British colonel to call on Adams, at home. The two were acquainted: the officer asked if he might speak in confidence and without interruption. Adams’s conduct left him vulnerable to a treason conviction. Might he rethink his stance? He could both make peace with his king and expect a handsome reward. Adams listened in silence to the elegantly packaged bribe. He rose when the colonel had finished. “Tell Governor Gage,” he glowered, “it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.”
Genre:
- "With incomparable wit, grace, and insight, Stacy Schiff narrates the birth of the American Revolution in Boston and the artful, elusive magician who made it all happen: Samuel Adams. For too long, Adams, hiding behind his many masks and stratagems, has evaded historians, but Schiff draws him from the shadows into the spotlight he so richly deserves. A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important. This is a time for Americans to meditate on the fate of their republic and no better place to start than here, at the beginning, with this book."—Ron Chernow
- "A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography. . .Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them."—Oprah Daily, "Favorite Books of 2022"
- "A superb new biography of Samuel Adams...Adams was...a patriot — maybe the most crucial patriot. The Revolutionary is not merely a dutiful exhumation of a poorly remembered Founding Father, it's a thrilling, timely account of how the American Revolution happened; how the colonists were radicalized and came to think of themselves not as Bostonians or Virginians, but as "Americans." The Revolutionary is informed on every page by scholarship, but Schiff, as Adams himself did, knows how to hold an audience.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
- "Stacy Schiff continues to showcase her command of the genre, thoroughly researching her books and breathing new life into history. In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff re-introduces readers to the founding father. Adams is considered to be historically overlooked, and Schiff reveals that that may have been intentional: the statesman and political philosopher destroyed countless documents and most of his personal correspondence. This book, at times brimming with drama, carefully sifts through the remaining materials to build a robust portrait of an important patriot."—Laura Zornosa, TIME ("100 Must-Read Books of 2022")
- "[With] exquisite, fact-based prose… Stacy Schiff has produced a delightfully enthralling and insightful account of an elusive Founding Father. A tour de force.”—Mark G. Spencer, The Wall Street Journal
- "Schiff...is a master biographer....These pages contain great drama and constant motion...To read this book is to immerse oneself in a very particular and thrilling time and place. Boston in the years leading up to 1776 was a wild and often dangerous city, with violent protests and brawls and raucous meetings of the people. This is how a democracy was born, a government by and for the people, at least in theory. With Adams as her fulcrum, Schiff vividly returns us to the streets and halls where it all began.” (4 Stars)—Chris Vognar, USA Today
- "Riveting, suspenseful, and even laugh-out-loud reading, as Adams outflanks the British at every turn. . . A vivid and evocative writer, Schiff excels in her portrayal of Boston in its agony and anger. . . Superb.”—Mary Ann Gwinn, Minneapolis Star Tribune
- “Beer drinkers know founding father Sam Adams as a brewer and a patriot; Pulitzer winner Schiff emphasizes a man of action who “muscled words into deeds” in the cause of American independence. Retracing Adams’s early years in Boston and his political awakening, Schiff vividly recounts major events in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, making for a fast-paced and enlightening account.”—Publishers Weekly, Gift Guide
- "An enthralling portrait…any book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Schiff is reason for excitement. Her previous subjects have established her as one of the most talented and creative biographers at work today. Readers interested in the American Revolution or the ability of individuals to destabilize political institutions will find her new book rewarding...[and] will likely find themselves agreeing with John Adams, who said, 'Without the character of Samuel Adams the true history of the American Revolution can never be written.'"—Amy S. Greenberg, New York Times Book Review
- "A wildly entertaining exploration of the roots of American political theatre."—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
- "Stacy Schiff has mastered the art of writing thoroughly researched, often captivating biographies, breathing new life into history. (She won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2000 for her biography of Vera Nabokov.) For her latest act, Schiff re-introduces readers to Samuel Adams, considered to be one of the more historically overlooked of the founding fathers. And that, in fact, may have been intentional: Adams destroyed most of his personal correspondence and countless documents, preferring to move inconspicuously. This biography, at times brimming with drama, carefully sifts through the limited remaining materials available to build a hearty portrait of a founding father.”—Lily Rothman, TIME
- "This enthralling biography is a persuasive exercise in rehabilitation. Through stylish prose and a close reading of Adams’s career as a canny propagandist, Schiff suggests that he may have done more than any other founder to prime colonists for armed rebellion and deserves to be better known."—Gregory Cowles, New York Times, Editors' Choice
- "Schiff traces these political cuts and thrusts with her customary skill and amazing readability; this is by far the most grippingly involving life of Samuel Adams ever written, charting the rise and flourishing of a key figure in the Revolution... All of those facets of the man are beautifully captured in The Revolutionary."—Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
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"Step aside, Thomas Jefferson; let’s talk about the man whose devotion to resistance behavior makes him, for some, the most essential figure in the American Revolution. Samuel Adams comes to electrifying life through this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s meticulous research and dynamic storytelling as a man of principle and persuasion. There was also Adams’ devotion to stealth and secrecy, which may be why it’s taken so long to tease out his unusual story."
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times - "Schiff masterfully chronicles the myriad twists and turns of Adams’s life…[and] understands how to translate even the most knotty history into quick-paced narrative. There is something about Samuel Adams that seems especially compelling today....We forget him and his ideas, it seems to me, at our peril."—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
- "It’s hard to put down without a newfound appreciation for just how important [Adams’] role was for the nation’s birth.”—Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press
- “Stacy Schiff is one of our finest biographers, able to explore and illuminate lives as diverse as those of Cleopatra and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Samuel Adams, is an exhilarating read, bringing to life a man often overshadowed by other Founding Fathers.”—Jim Kelly, Air Mail
- "A bold new telling of the forgotten Founder."—Smithsonian Magazine
- “Schiff’s new biography is a good place to start to get one’s bearings on this fascinating Founding Father.”—Republican American
- “The inimitable Stacy Schiff, author of utterly captivating books…returns with a biography of one of the most pivotal and oddly neglected of all the U.S. Founding Fathers: Samuel Adams, cousin to the more famous politician (and second president) John. Schiff’s book finds the real man behind the Revolutionary mythos.”—Christian Science Monitor
- “A new book from Pulitzer Prize–winning, powerhouse historian Schiff is always an event.”—Booklist
- "In her terrific new biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff presents readers with a vivid sense of this complicated man. Electrifying. . . Schiff writes with keen insight and wit throughout. By the end of The Revolutionary, attentive readers will vibrate with questions about the parallels between Adams’ political era and our own."—BookPage (starred review)
- "Revelatory and frequently riveting...Throughout, Schiff vividly recounts major events in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, including the Stamp Act Crisis, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party, and draws incisive sketches of Loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson, Patriot lawyer James Otis, and others. Fast-paced and enlightening, this is a must-read for colonial history buffs."—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
- "Schiff is one of the most formidable nonfiction writers working today.”—BookRiot
- "This is a meticulously researched and often eloquent work of historical biography… Schiff offers a welcome, fresh study featuring notions of liberty and democracy that feel particularly relevant in today’s consistently tumultuous political landscape."—Kirkus Reviews
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“After I put down The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, I wanted to pick it up and read it over again from the beginning, if only from the pleasure of the prose. . . Read this book if you wish to know how, historically speaking, thirteen English colonies became the United States.”
—Robert Knox, Medium.com - PRAISE FOR THE WITCHES:
- "An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller: J. K. Rowling meets Antony Beevor, Stephen King, and Marina Warner... Schiff’s writing is to die for.”—The Times (London)
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“Every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable, the phrases rising, cresting and falling like all the best incantations. [Schiff] casts a spell on you.” (4 Stars)
—Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today - "Schiff brings to bear a sensibility as different from the Puritans’ as can be imagined: gentle, ironic, broadly empathetic, with a keen eye for humor and nuance. Thanks to this, and to Schiff’s narrative gifts, the present-day reader flits above New England’s smoky chimneys and thatched rooftops... it is wizardry of a sort—in a flash of brimstone, a whole world made wondrously visible.”—The Atlantic
- “Haunting...the first major commercial nonfiction book on the subject in decades...Ms. Schiff instead delivers an almost novelistic, thrillerlike narrative of those manic nine months. By sidestepping most of the popular theories, The Witches...stands out from much of the existing literature.”—The New York Times
- "[Schiff's] research is impeccable; no previous writer has scoured the documentary record to such great depth. Moreover, she has mastered the entire history of early New England—from long before to well after the year of the witch-hunt....Indeed, readers may experience her narrative as a virtual tour of the time and place....Schiff’s skills as a writer extend to such formal matters as structure, pacing, and point of view...she maintains throughout the authority of an omniscient narrator who is firmly in charge.”—John Demos, The New York Review of Books
- "Engagingly thorough, thrillingly told and bracingly authoritative."—Jean Zimmerman, NPR
- "As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Cleopatra, Schiff excels at finding fresh angles on familiar stories, carries out massive research and then weaves it into a dazzling social panorama. In Henry James’s phrase from The Art of Fiction, she is a writer on whom nothing is lost....a superb account of the Terror of Salem."—Elaine Showalter, Washington Post
- PRAISE FOR CLEOPATRA:
- "A masterpiece...[Schiff] has brought to life Cleopatra."—Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
- “A work of literature.”—Judith Thurman, The New Yorker
- “Enthralling.”—Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
- “Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down.”—Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson & the Olympians series
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"Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world."
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
- On Sale
- Oct 25, 2022
- Page Count
- 432 pages
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN-13
- 9780316441117
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