Download The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson AudioBook Free
Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious audience, and a gifted article writer - a guy who prided himself on his knowledge of traditional and modern dialects and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life in our most literary leader. In The Road to Monticello, Kevin J. Hayes fills this important space by supplying a lively accounts of Jefferson's spiritual and intellectual development, focusing on the books and ideas that exerted the most deep effect on him. Moving chronologically through Jefferson's life, Hayes uncovers the entire range and depth of Jefferson's literary passions, from the favorite "small books" sold by vacationing chapmen, such as The History of Tom Thumb, which enthralled him as a child; to his lifelong love of Aesop's Fables and ; his proposal with Horace, Ovid, Virgil and other authors of traditional antiquity; and his profound affinity with the melancholy verse of Ossian, the renowned third-century Gaelic warrior-poet. Sketching on Jefferson's letters, publications, and commonplace books, Hayes offers a wealth of new scholarship on the printing culture of colonial America, uncovers an intimate portrait of Jefferson's activities beyond the political chamber, and reconstructs the president's investigations in such different fields of knowledge as laws, history, beliefs and natural research. Most importantly, Hayes uncovers the ideas and exchanges which educated the thinking about America's first great intellectual and shows how his lifelong quest for knowledge culminated in the formation of a general population offering, the "academic town" which became UVA, and his more private retreat at Monticello. Gracefully written and painstakingly researched, The Road to Monticello provides an invaluable take a look at Jefferson's intellectual and literary life, uncovering the roots of a few of the most crucial - and important - ideas which may have informed American background.
