Primary Decisions

According the Library of Congress catalog (which got its start with a president's library, although we'll discuss that in a few months), there are 1,134 biographies of George Washington. Washington's own papers run to a few dozen collected volumes. With so many choices, how do we choose a single biography to read? Can we possibly encompass the width and breadth of 43 presidents' lives in single books when we could easily spend our lives reading about just one?

Well, no. So we've got to pick one. In some cases, the choice is easy, thanks to a recent major biography (David McCullough's John Adams, for example. Or there just isn't much written about the president (William Henry Harrison, I'm looking in your direction). Sometimes we'll let what we can get at the library make the decision for us.

But Washington--well, that's tricky. Lots about him. After some reflection (and digging around Amazon), we've settled on Joseph J. Ellis's His Excellency, George Washington. On the surface, it's got lots going for it--Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his writings on the Founding Fathers, the almost-four-years-old book is still in Amazon's top 3,000 (not to mention the best-selling bio of GW on the Kindle), and there's even a bit of scandal about Ellis's claims of Washington's relationship with his neighbor Sally Fairfax. But scratch the surface a little, and there's something interesting going on with the author, too; something that might reveal a little about why and how biography gets written.