Why Is Samuel Adams the Forgotten Founding Father?

Thomas Jefferson considered Samuel Adams the earliest, most active, and most persevering of the revolution. Yet when we think of the founders, his name is often missing, submerged by other founders, his cousin John Adams or John Hancock, or obviously Washington and Jefferson himself. Now, Stacy Schiff does what she does brilliantly in The Revolutionary: Samuel Adam, using her Pulitzer Prize0winning skills as a biographer to bring to life the revolution, the politics, the propaganda, and the man who insidiously and deliberately became a revolutionary of the first order. Resurrecting a man history has almost forgotten, a man without whom our history might have taken a different course. ________________________________ Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City. Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books. Related Episodes: George Packer on Redefining "American" Can We Salvage Patriotism? Should We?