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Washington: A Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner) Paperback – September 27, 2011

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From the author of  Alexander Hamilton , the New York Times bestselling biography that inspired the musical, comes a  gripping portrait of the first president of the United States. Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography “Truly magnificent . . . [a] well-researched, well-written and absolutely definitive biography”  —Andrew Roberts,  The Wall Street Journal “Until recently, I’d never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping biography of George Washington . . . Well, I was wrong. I can’t recommend it highly enough—as history, as epic, and, not least, as entertainment.”  —Hendrik Hertzberg,  The New Yorker Celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation and the first president of the United States. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one volume biography of George Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his adventurous early years, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow shatters forever the stereotype of George Washington as a stolid, unemotional figure and brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Broadway musical  Hamilton  has sparked new interest in the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers. In addition to Alexander Hamilton, the production also features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Aaron Burr, Lafayette, and many more.

• Print length 928 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date September 27, 2011
• Dimensions 9.21 x 5.98 x 2.16 inches
• ISBN-10 0143119966
• ISBN-13 978-0143119968
• See all details

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Prelude The Portrait Artist

In March 1793 Gilbert Stuart crossed the North Atlantic for the express purpose of painting President George Washington, the supreme prize of the age for any ambitious portrait artist. Though born in Rhode Island and reared in Newport, Stuart had escaped to the cosmopolitan charms of London during the war and spent eighteen years producing portraits of British and Irish grandees. Overly fond of liquor, prodigal in his spending habits, and with a giant brood of children to support, Stuart had landed in the Marshalsea Prison in Dublin, most likely for debt, just as Washington was being sworn in as first president of the United States in 1789.

For the impulsive, unreliable Stuart, who left a trail of incomplete paintings and irate clients in his wake, George Washington emerged as the savior who would rescue him from insistent creditors. "When I can net a sum sufficient to take me to America, I shall be off to my native soil," he confided eagerly to a friend. "There I expect to make a fortune by Washington alone. I calculate upon making a plurality of his portraits… and if I should be fortunate, I will repay my English and Irish creditors." In a self-portrait daubed years earlier, Stuart presented himself as a restless soul, with tousled reddish-brown hair, keen blue eyes, a strongly marked nose, and a pugnacious chin. This harried, disheveled man was scarcely the sort to appeal to the immaculately formal George Washington.

Once installed in New York, Stuart mapped out a path to Washington with the thoroughness of a military campaign. He stalked Washington's trusted friend Chief Justice John Jay and rendered a brilliant portrait of him, seated in the full majesty of his judicial robes. Shortly afterward Stuart had in hand the treasured letter of introduction from Jay to President Washington that would unlock the doors of the executive residence in Philadelphia, then the temporary capital.

As a portraitist, the garrulous Stuart had perfected a technique to penetrate his subjects' defenses. He would disarm them with a steady stream of personal anecdotes and irreverent wit, hoping that this glib patter would coax them into self-revelation. In the taciturn George Washington, a man of granite self-control and a stranger to spontaneity, Gilbert Stuart met his match. From boyhood, Washington had struggled to master and conceal his deep emotions. When the wife of the British ambassador later told him that his face showed pleasure at his forthcoming departure from the presidency, Washington grew indignant: "You are wrong. My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings!" He tried to govern his tongue as much as his face: "With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions."

When Washington swept into his first session with Stuart, the artist was awestruck by the tall, commanding president. Predictably, the more Stuart tried to pry open his secretive personality, the tighter the president clamped it shut. Stuart's opening gambit backfired. "Now, sir," Stuart instructed his sitter, "you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter." To which Washington retorted drily that Mr. Stuart need not forget "who he is or who General Washington is."

A master at sizing people up, Washington must have cringed at Stuart's facile bonhomie, not to mention his drinking, snuff taking, and ceaseless chatter. With Washington, trust had to be earned slowly, and he balked at instant familiarity with people. Instead of opening up with Stuart, he retreated behind his stolid mask. The scourge of artists, Washington knew how to turn himself into an impenetrable monument long before an obelisk arose in his honor in the nation's capital.

As Washington sought to maintain his defenses, Stuart made the brilliant decision to capture the subtle interplay between his outward calm and his intense hidden emotions, a tension that defined the man. He spied the extraordinary force of personality lurking behind an extremely restrained facade. The mouth might be compressed, the parchment skin drawn tight over ungainly dentures, but Washington's eyes still blazed from his craggy face. In the enduring image that Stuart captured and that ended up on the one-dollar bill—a magnificent statement of Washington's moral stature and sublime, visionary nature—he also recorded something hard and suspicious in the wary eyes with their penetrating gaze and hooded lids.

With the swift insight of artistic genius, Stuart grew convinced that Washington was not the placid and composed figure he presented to the world. In the words of a mutual acquaintance, Stuart had insisted that "there are features in [Washington's] face totally different from what he ever observed in that of any other human being; the sockets of the eyes, for instance, are larger than he ever met with before, and the upper part of the nose broader. All his features, [Stuart] observed, were indicative of the strongest and most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forests, it was his opinion that [Washington] would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes." The acquaintance confirmed that Washington's intimates thought him "by nature a man of fierce and irritable disposition, but that, like Socrates, his judgment and great self-command have always made him appear a man of a different cast in the eyes of the world."

Although many contemporaries were fooled by Washington's aura of cool command, those who knew him best shared Stuart's view of a sensitive, complex figure, full of pent-up passion. "His temper was naturally high-toned [that is, high-strung], but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it," wrote Thomas Jefferson. "If ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in wrath." John Adams concurred. "He had great self-command… but to preserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity. Whenever he lost his temper, as he did sometimes, either love or fear in those about him induced them to conceal his weakness from the world." Gouverneur Morris agreed that Washington had "the tumultuous passions which accompany greatness and frequently tarnish its luster. With them was his first contest, and his first victory was over himself… Yet those who have seen him strongly moved will bear witness that his wrath was terrible. They have seen, boiling in his bosom, passion almost too mighty for man."

So adept was Washington at masking these turbulent emotions behind his fabled reserve that he ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved. He seems to lack the folksy appeal of an Abraham Lincoln, the robust vigor of a Teddy Roosevelt, or the charming finesse of a Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, George Washington has receded so much in our collective memory that he has become an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human. How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.

From a laudable desire to venerate Washington, we have sanded down the rough edges of his personality and made him difficult to grasp. He joined in this conspiracy to make himself unknowable. Where other founders gloried in their displays of intellect, Washington's strategy was the opposite: the less people knew about him, the more he thought he could accomplish. Opacity was his means of enhancing his power and influencing events. Where Franklin, Hamilton, or Adams always sparkled in print or in person, the laconic Washington had no need to flaunt his virtues or fill conversational silences. Instead, he wanted the public to know him as a public man, concerned with the public weal and transcending egotistical needs.

Washington's lifelong struggle to control his emotions speaks to the issue of how he exercised leadership as a politician, a soldier, a planter, and even a slaveholder. People felt the inner force of his nature, even if they didn't exactly hear it or see it; they sensed his moods without being told. In studying his life, one is struck not only by his colossal temper but by his softer emotions: this man of deep feelings was sensitive to the delicate nuances of relationships and prone to tears as well as temper. He learned how to exploit his bottled-up emotions to exert his will and inspire and motivate people. If he aroused universal admiration, it was often accompanied by a touch of fear and anxiety. His contemporaries admired him not because he was a plaster saint or an empty uniform but because they sensed his unseen power. As the Washington scholar W. W. Abbot noted, "An important element in Washington's leadership both as a military commander and as President was his dignified, even forbidding, demeanor, his aloofness, the distance he consciously set and maintained between himself and nearly all the rest of the world."9

The goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries. By gleaning anecdotes and quotes from myriad sources, especially from hundreds of eyewitness accounts, I have tried to make him vivid and immediate, rather than the lifeless waxwork he has become for many Americans, and thereby elucidate the secrets of his uncanny ability to lead a nation. His unerring judgment, sterling character, rectitude, steadfast patriotism, unflagging sense of duty, and civic-mindedness—these exemplary virtues were achieved only by his ability to subdue the underlying volatility of his nature and direct his entire psychological makeup to the single-minded achievement of a noble cause.

A man capable of constant self-improvement, Washington grew in stature throughout his life. This growth went on subtly, at times imperceptibly, beneath the surface, making Washington the most interior of the founders. His real passions and often fiery opinions were typically confined to private letters rather than public utterances. During the Revolution and his presidency, the public Washington needed to be upbeat and inspirational, whereas the private man was often gloomy, scathing, hot-blooded, and pessimistic.

For this reason, the new edition of the papers of George Washington, started in 1968 and one of the great ongoing scholarly labors of our time, has provided an extraordinary window into his mind. The indefatigable team of scholars at the University of Virginia has laid a banquet table for Washington biographers and made somewhat outmoded the monumental Washington biographies of the mid-twentieth century: the seven volumes published by Douglas Southall Freeman (1948 – 57) and the four volumes by James T. Flexner (1965 – 72). This book is based on a close reading of the sixty volumes of letters and diaries published so far in the new edition, supplemented by seventeen volumes from the older edition to cover the historical gaps. Never before have we had access to so much material about so many aspects of Washington's public and private lives.

In recent decades, many fine short biographies of Washington have appeared as well as perceptive studies of particular events, themes, or periods in his life. My intention is to produce a large-scale, one-volume, cradle-to-grave narrative that will be both dramatic and authoritative, encompassing the explosion of research in recent decades that has enriched our understanding of Washington as never before. The upshot, I hope, will be that readers, instead of having a frosty respect for Washington, will experience a visceral appreciation of this foremost American who scaled the highest peak of political greatness.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Standard Edition (September 27, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 928 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143119966
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143119968
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.94 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.21 x 5.98 x 2.16 inches
• #15 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
• #21 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
• #30 in US Presidents

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Review - Washington, a Life by Ron Chernow

Christine M Hash

Washington: A Life

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About the author

Ron chernow.

Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

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Author Ron Chernow explores the fascinating evolution of George Washington into a leader

An interview with author Ron Chernow, who talks about his fascinating new biography, "Washington: A Life."

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Ron Chernow has been called a self-made historian, and he owns up to the label. The author of six award-winning works of history and biography, Chernow came to authorship as an English major intending to write novels. But “every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged,” he recalls.

Lucky for his admiring readers. Chernow, winner of the 1990 National Book Award for his first book, “The House of Morgan,” writes immensely readable books, thanks to a novelist’s mastery of two techniques: a. telling a compelling story and b. creating unforgettable characters. Those skills are on full display in his new biography: “Washington: A Life,” (Penguin Press, 904 pp., $40) , an enthralling account of the life and times of George Washington that took Chernow six years to write.

Chernow chronicles an amazing transformation, as George Washington grows from an insecure young man with a hair-trigger temper to a leader bearing the weight of America’s birth and early development on his shoulders.

Like other Washington biographers, Chernow has benefited from his subject’s “compulsion to record his everyday life.” Scholars are still sifting through the results: Chernow made extensive use of the Washington Papers, a project at the University of Virginia dedicated to compiling everything ever written by and about George Washington. This collection has expanded from 39 volumes in the 1930s to “sixty volumes of letters and diaries and still counting,” Chernow writes. “Strange as it may seem, George Washington’s life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.”

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In a phone interview, Chernow estimated that 900 books have already been written on Washington. But he decided there was more to say about the father of our country after coming upon a letter written by Alexander Hamilton (a previous subject of a Chernow biography) to his father-in-law after Hamilton and Washington had a serious falling out. The simmering conflict implied in the letter suggested a more complicated Washington than the wooden-faced elder statesman of the Gilbert Stuart paintings.

The early sections of Chernow’s book show Washington as the young man he was before the responsibilities of leadership claimed him: an extraordinary horseman and athlete, a flirt with the ladies and a shrewd, if sometimes avaricious, businessman.

As a politician, Washington became a canny strategizer with a gift for standing back until the main chance presented itself. As a member (by marriage) of the Virginia aristocracy, he was something of a snob — until the privations of the Revolutionary War forged an emotional bond between Washington and the common soldiers of the Continental Army. As a leader, he had to learn to curb a violent temper, waiting to deliver payback to his enemies at the most strategic moment.

“The people who worked for him saw him as a fierce, hard-driving perfectionist,” says Chernow, a man under incredible pressure from the moment he took on the leadership of the Continental Army. “This was a man who had to deal with constant shortages of money, blankets, clothing, shoes — day after day of pleading” for help from what Chernow calls Washington’s “fourteen masters” — the leadership of the thirteen states and the Continental Congress.

“It’s hard to imagine any other person at that time or even since being able to carry the weight of that burden amid all these enormous frustrations — to hold that ragged army intact,” Chernow says. Washington’s character lends credence to the belief that historical events are driven by influential individuals — “People who don’t think there’s truth in the great man or woman theory of history should read this book,” Chernow said.

Nowhere was Washington more conflicted than in his feelings toward slavery; Washington was “oppressed” by the issue for his entire life, Chernow says.

Early on, as a plantation owner, “he thought that slavery was a bad bargain, not just for the slave but the master,” Chernow says. Washington would total up his layout for food and money and medical care and wonder why his slaves weren’t working harder. “He couldn’t see that there was no benefit to them for working harder,” Chernow says.

Washington’s attitudes began to change when he witnessed the bravery of black soldiers in the Continental Army (blacks fought on both sides in the conflict). In his will, he directed that the 125 slaves under his direct control be freed after his wife Martha’s death.

Chernow’s story is that of a good but flawed man who became a great man. Readers will discover a Washington who starts out as all-too-human, then “just keeps getting better and better,” said Chernow. “I wanted to show George Washington, not being George Washington, but becoming George Washington.”

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or [email protected] .

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Book Reviews

A portrait on paper: chernow's 'washington, a life'.

W. Ralph Eubanks

Gilbert Stuart's famous "Landsdowne portrait" of George Washington, painted in 1796. AP/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution hide caption

Gilbert Stuart's famous "Landsdowne portrait" of George Washington, painted in 1796.

While painting one of his famous portraits, Gilbert Stuart discovered that George Washington was a different man from the cool, calm and composed figure of his public persona.  Based on Washington's facial features alone -- his deep-set eyes and the broad upper nose -- Stuart believed that Washington was "by nature a man of fierce and irritable disposition."

Never one to let his guard down, Washington resisted Stuart's attempts to get him to open up -- he believed a man should be courteous to all but intimate with few. Perhaps that explains why, in spite of numerous portraits, each likeness of Washington has made him seem more unknowable rather than revealing intimate components of his persona.

Capturing an image of George Washington on a canvas may be as difficult as describing him as a man in full on the page. While there have been numerous books written about him, few of them have given as complete a picture of our first president as Ron Chernow's compelling new biography, Washington: A Life. What helped Chernow write a book that captures Washington's essence is the close reading he did of 60 volumes of letters and diaries published as part of the George Washington Papers project, as well as numerous other works of scholarship.

Washington: A Life By Ron Chernow Hardcover, 928 pages Penguin press HC List Price: $40 Read An Excerpt

Now, before you think this is a book to shy away from -- a mere regurgitation of historical facts and transcripts of moldy 18th century correspondence -- Washington: A Life is far from that. It is a biography of Washington for the 21st century, one that examines his conflicts and foibles as well as his triumphs. It is a psychological as well as a historical portrait. Chernow makes sure the reader sees the tempestuous side of Washington that many knew lay under his calm demeanor but was revealed to only a few.

Through Chernow's narrative, the reader watches Washington transform himself from an insecure young colonel in the French and Indian War to the president of a young nation. In the progression, a large cast of characters comes in and out of the picture, providing a perspective on Washington's personal relationships and the strengths and weaknesses of his personality. Readers also get a sense of Washington's ambivalence about slavery. Chernow explains how Washington struggled with the idea of slavery, but fell back on the self-serving fantasy that it would fall away.

Washington: A Life keeps its distance from Washington mythology, and its narrative informs as much as it entertains. Starting with the book's epigraph -- "Simple truth is his greatest eulogy," a quote from Abigail Adams -- Chernow lets the reader know he wants to give an accurate portrayal of an enigmatic historical figure. In this book's pages, he does it in a way that not even the most gifted portrait artist of Washington ever could.

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George Washington, Ron Chernow, and ‘Small Government’

By Hendrik Hertzberg

UPDATE, April 18th: Chernow’s book has won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Until recently, I’d never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping biography of George Washington. I mean, Marcus Cunliffe’s “George Washington: Man and Monument” is a fine book, witty and diverting, but it’s more about the monument than the man. Its main subject is public relations, eighteenth-century style: the deliberate creation (by Washington himself, among other skilled flacks) of the Washington image—the unapproachable, untouchable, impossibly heroic, boringly wise, ultimately unknowable Great Stone Face.

But a biography that would make Washington live ? That would persuade the reader that he was an actual person? That would make his greatness palpable, real, and humanly understandable—and all the greater—by weaving it into a tapestry of struggle, emotion, doubts, rages, sulks, flaws? That would make you not just respect him and be grateful that we had his leadership at the moment of our national birth but even love him a little? Impossible, I thought.

Well, I was wrong. Ron Chernow’s huge (900 pages) “ George Washington: A Life ,” which I’ve just finished, does all that and more. I can’t recommend it highly enough—as history, as epic, and, not least, as entertainment. It’s as luxuriantly pleasurable as one of those great big sprawling, sweeping Victorian novels. It leaves the reader persuaded that in the three stages of his astounding public career—Revolutionary War commander-in-chief, presiding officer of the Constitutional Convention, President of the United States—this childless, difficult man fully earned the right to be called Father of his Country.

It turns out that Washington, via Chernow, has some things to say about the present moment. Tea Party rightists are making a great noise about their love of the Founding Fathers. On Thursday, the House Republicans will kick off the 112th Congress with a round-robin recitation of the text of the Constitution. The idea is that the Founders and the Framers would be on board with today’s small-government conservatism. “Washington: A Life” is full of contrary indications. The General, Chernow writes, railed against

the rickety political structure that hampered his army. That November [of 1777] Congress had completed drafting the Articles of Confederation, creating a loose confederacy of states with a notably weak central government. Dreading the hobgoblin of concentrated power, states shrank from levying taxes… A leitmotif of his wartime letters was that short-sighted states would come to ruin without an effective central government. [page 328]

The long fight against British tyranny, paradoxically, only strengthened his view that the foremost political danger came, not from an overly powerful central government, but from an enfeebled one—“a half-starved, limping government that appears to be always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step.” [463]

Although he held his tongue during the debates [at the Constitutional Convention], Washington was never a neutral party, and the interminable squabbling only reinforced his view that the country needed a potent central government to override the selfish ambitions of local politicians. [534]

Washington and his political friends, such as Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, wanted a strong government—stronger, in fact, than the one the Constitutional Convention ended up proposing. But once the draft was finished, no one opposed ratification on the grounds that the new government would be too weak. The opposition came entirely from small-government fanatics like Patrick Henry. That’s why the Federalist Papers focussed on reassuring the undecided that the new government wouldn’t be the terrifying behemoth that Henry & Co. were portraying it as. The Federalist Papers were written for a short-term political purpose, as a political weapon in a particular political fight. Admirable though they are, they were spin. Even the title was spin: “federalist” was originally the self-designation of the weak-government proponents of the Articles of Confederation; Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and their ilk had earlier called themselves “nationalists.” They stole the other side’s name for the same reasons that Reagan used to praise F.D.R., Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” and Obama often has a kind word for Reagan.

Nobody today is the exact equivalent of anybody in 1789, of course, but Tea Party Republicans more closely resemble those who denounced the Constitution than those who advocated it.

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Dusting Off an Elusive President’s Dull Image

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By Janet Maslin

• Sept. 27, 2010

When George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States, he had only one original tooth left. It was “a lonely lower left bicuspid,” according to Ron Chernow’s vast and tenaciously researched new biography. But Mr. Chernow was not content merely to write about the tooth and its larger implications, which range from questions about Washington’s apparent reticence in later life (did his dental troubles keep him from speaking?) to his harshly pragmatic attitude toward slavery (he purchased slaves’ teeth, perhaps for use in dentures). Mr. Chernow also paid a personal visit to the tooth at the medical library where it is stored.

His thoroughness in “Washington: A Life” is prompted by the Papers of George Washington, a research project that has been under way at the University of Virginia since 1968, has passed the 60-volume mark and is nowhere near complete. Mr. Chernow argues that this project has unearthed enough new material to warrant “a large-scale, one-volume, cradle-to-grave narrative” about Washington, despite the excellent work of biographers including Joseph J. Ellis and James T. Flexner and the reading public’s impression that the story of Washington’s life is already well known.

The sheer volume of new research easily validates Mr. Chernow’s effort. But “Washington” also has a simpler raison d’être. It means to dust off Washington’s image, penetrate the opacity that can most generously be called “sphinxlike” and replace readers’ “frosty respect” for Washington with “visceral appreciation.” In other words, Mr. Chernow, who made a similar effort to inject excitement into the Alexander Hamilton story, has taken on an even greater challenge this time.

“Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness,” Mr. Chernow writes at the start. And Washington truly “ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.”

But it soon becomes clear in “Washington” that there are legitimate reasons for why Washington’s popularity (at least among biography readers) has been eclipsed by showy and protean figures like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Those founding fathers liked to make their ideas and opinions widely known; Washington once claimed indignantly that his face never betrayed his feelings.

Washington seldom had simple reasons for taking action, and whatever his motives, he rarely liked to tip his hand. He was not well educated. He was not a philosopher. And “in a century of sterling wits, George Washington never stood out for his humor,” Mr. Chernow writes, “but he had a bawdy streak and relished hearty, masculine jokes.”

He was also known as a harsh taskmaster, a regalia-loving clotheshorse, a fanatic for fastidious details (he chose the living creatures that surrounded him, whether soldiers or white horses, by exact physical specifications), a literal slave driver and a chilly commander. Mr. Chernow tells the possibly apocryphal story of how Hamilton conned his fellow founding father Gouverneur Morris into glad-handing Washington with “a friendly slap on the shoulder” and lived to regret it. Washington famously did not like to be touched.

But that was the old Washington. The new one that emerges from Mr. Chernow’s account is more human and accessible. And although “Washington” never takes an overly psychoanalytical tack, it does find one big reason for its subject’s lifelong aloofness and hauteur: his mother, Mary Ball Washington.

“With more to brag about than any other mother in American history, she took no evident pride in her son’s accomplishments,” Mr. Chernow writes. “His Excellency! What nonsense!” she once exclaimed about her famous son.

“Washington” has an enormous span, even if some of its content is familiar from other overlapping biographies. (Mr. Chernow often falls back on his earlier insights into the Hamilton-Jefferson infighting that colored Washington’s presidency.) But it captures the ambitious, proud and sharp-elbowed prodigy that Washington was in his early 20s, when his renown during the French and Indian War catapulted him into military leadership.

And in a book that pays meticulous attention to the decisions made by Washington during wartime, with a step-by-step march through the eight years of Revolutionary War battles, Mr. Chernow arrives at a carefully considered assessment of his subject’s capabilities. He sees the successes and failures of Washington’s military decisions. But he places much higher value on the great man’s political instincts and shows how they rarely failed him. And he argues that Washington’s ability to hold his soldiers together and set a proud, stoical example mattered more than any individual battle could.

At 900-odd densely packed pages, “Washington” can be arid at times. But it’s also deeply rewarding as a whole, and it does genuinely amplify and recast our perceptions of Washington’s importance. When his presidency begins, “Washington” becomes a mini- “Team of Rivals,” complete with stellar cast and monumentally important issues to be faced. This new portrait offers a fresh sense of what a groundbreaking role Washington played, not only in physically embodying his new nation’s leadership but also in interpreting how its newly articulated constitutional principles would be applied. A more ostentatiously regal leader could never have accomplished as much as this seemingly reluctant hero achieved.

“Washington” also devotes great attention to the harsh criticism that Washington faced as soon as the luster faded and the governing began. As president, missing his beloved Mount Vernon and incurring great financial losses to serve as head of state, he was carped about so relentlessly that even his way of tapping a fork at the dinner table could become fodder for malicious gossip.

Mr. Chernow describes both the pettiness of these complaints and the gravity of other, more important ones, most crucially Washington’s behavior as a slave owner. The book doggedly follows the changeable, inconsistent, sometimes flagrantly dishonest Washington through a morass of contradictory gestures, and Mr. Chernow works hard to parse this material with a judicious eye.

The best he can do, and the best Washington allows, is this revealing passage: “With a politician’s instinct, Washington spoke to different people in different voices. When addressing other Virginia planters, he spoke in the cold, hard voice of practicality, whereas when dealing with Revolutionary comrades, he blossomed into an altruist.”

How fully can these contradictions be fathomed? The father of our country remains a moving target for historians, no matter how many of his letters and papers come to light.

By Ron Chernow

Illustrated. 904 pages. The Penguin Press. $40.

Chernow biography reframes Washington in 'A Life'

Had Ron Chernow not chosen to write biographies, he would have made a spectacular shrink. The man has a bone-deep understanding of what motivates human beings.

He's chosen to analyze historical figures in award-winning biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller Sr.

Now he's put big daddy on the couch George Washington . The result is so good in explaining the American Revolution , the founding of this country and the complicated man who served as its first president that it could serve as a textbook for high school students.

In fact, even history buffs who have put a dent in the mountain of books about the Founding Fathers should consider this one because of the quality of the writing and psychological insights.

Seven years in the making, Washington brims with beautifully crafted sentences that chip away at Washington's impassive facade. Though his early biographies added to it, Washington himself crafted this persona in youth to hide his unusually passionate and turbulent nature. Though outwardly methodical, disciplined and taciturn, inside he was feverishly ambitious, prone to anger and ravenous for status, according to Chernow.

Why? One reason: his emotionally withholding mother. (Washington's father died when he was 11.) No military victory, no national acclaim, no financial support merited her praise. Chernow acknowledges that as a widow with a large family living on an isolated plantation, Mary Washington had a reason for wanting to keep George on the farm.

History also might have turned out differently had the British army made a place in its ranks for the ambitious Washington who served in the French and Indian War , instead of discriminating against him as a colonial.

These slights would feed a simmering rage in the future revolutionary, as did the London merchants who overcharged him for the lavish luxury goods he ordered. Readers will be surprised to discover Washington was the original debt-ridden American consumer.

Step by step, Chernow chronicles how Washington rose in the world. There was his friendship with the fabulously rich Fairfax family in Virginia. And the more than friendship but probably unconsummated love affair with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his mentor. After Washington's advantageous and loving marriage to the wealthy Martha, the two women became close friends, but at the end of his life, Washington wrote Sally that nothing in his life compared to the happiness of those youthful hours with her.

This bio also makes it clear that physical appearance was just as important in 1776 as it is today. Washington's immaculate 6-foot presence inspired men and dazzled women. His wide hips and muscular thighs made him the ultimate man on horseback in a world of riders.

Chernow covers Washington's extraordinary saga the Revolution, the presidency, the reluctant celebrity of Mount Vernon. Chernow pays particular attention to Washington, the demanding slave owner who led the most integrated army until the Vietnam War . Unlike any of the other Founding Fathers, Washington freed his slaves and in his will provided education and training for younger ones and assistance for older ones.

Here, Washington displayed the qualities that Chernow believes made him the one giant among the Founding Fathers. He acted with force and pragmatism, which meant defying convention.

The reader finishes this biography dazzled by Washington, grateful to Chernow, and eager for a miniseries on the order of HBO 's John Adams .

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

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Patriots & Partners: An Interview with Ron Chernow

Adapted from a conversation between the Washington Library’s Doug Bradburn and author Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ron Chernow is the author of best-selling biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton . Chernow sat down with Doug Bradburn, the Washington Library’s founding director, to discuss that history-making partnership, including its most recent and innovative portrayal—the hit hip-hop musical Hamilton , for which he was the historic advisor.

How did you become interested in Hamilton? Washington?

In 1998, when I started working on Hamilton, he seemed to be the neglected and misunderstood founding father. I decided to write about Washington because, when I was writing about Hamilton, I had a moment of epiphany. Seeing Washington through Hamilton—who was very perceptive and a good enough writer that he could really make characters come alive—I began to spy a portrait of Washington that had not been done before.

Alexander Hamilton and George Washington were from very different worlds—why were they so attracted to one another?

Alexander Hamilton, an illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean, is painfully aware of his lack of status but is tremendously ambitious. He is an outsider trying to fight his way into the inner ranks of society and government. George Washington was born at a much higher level, but was very self-conscious about what he referred to as his “defective” education . He wanted to enter the upper ranks of Virginia gentry, and so he was, in his way, conscious of being an outsider.

How would you characterize the relationship between Washington and Hamilton?

Hamilton said, “Our dispositions could not have been more unlike.” His was a brash and headstrong personality; he was very mercurial and brilliant and very impulsive. Washington was the opposite: cautious, thorough, slow, and methodical. These two men complement each other in a way that just feels uncannily right.

When did Hamilton catch the attention of Washington and become part of his “military family”?

Hamilton’s reputation preceded him even before January 1777, which is when he received notice to contact Washington about being an aide de camp. He had already distinguished himself in battle, and rebuffed invitations to join the staffs of three generals. But a request from Washington was irresistible.

How did Washington and Hamilton get on during the war? Did they have disagreements? Did they have a falling out?

Hamilton had this obsession with military glory, so he keeps asking Washington for field command, where another young man would have been so pleased and flattered to be in Washington’s “family.” Washington made the right decision that Hamilton was probably more valuable behind a desk than he was on the field of battle, but when Hamilton finally had his chance at Yorktown , he certainly did cover himself with glory.

What was their relationship like after the war in the 1780s?

Their political vision of the country had been very much forged going through the war together. Hamilton was very important in coaxing Washington back out of retirement, convincing him that the American Revolution is incomplete without the Constitutional Convention . I think this was really the most productive partnership of the early years of the republic. I think that they were an unbeatable team, one of those cases in history where the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.

How did Washington’s relationship with Hamilton evolve as his friendship with Madison/Jefferson began to deteriorate?

Even when Hamilton and Jefferson started feuding, Washington was able to tolerate a quite significant degree of dissent from within his administration . Madison exiled himself from Washington’s affection. Jefferson, too, pulls away from Washington. But Washington never had a cause to doubt the personal and political loyalty of Alexander Hamilton right up to the day that Washington died.

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This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Mount Vernon Magazine .

10 Facts about George Washington and the Revolutionary War

Learn more about General Washington's role in securing victory in the American Revolution.

Ron Chernow: Washington and Hamilton

We sit down and talk with Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Ron Chernow to discuss the unique relationship between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Mount Vernon Magazine. Subscribe to the magazine by becoming a member today.

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