Thomas Jefferson : A Brief Biography

Dumas Malone wrote his first 15,000 word essay about Jefferson for the scholarly Dictionary of American Biography. This reprint is Malone's own revision of that essay, made after his decades of study of a remarkable American.

University of Virginia Press

In this small jewel of a biography, readers will become acquainted with the mind and temperament of Thomas Jefferson as written by the greatest of Jefferson scholars. Dumas Malone, author of the unrivaled six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, brought fifty years of research and scholarship to the writing of this essay. It is a life story told with great respect and without hero worship.

At the time of his death late in 1986, Dumas Malone was acknowledged as the greatest scholar ever to study and write a biography of Thomas Jefferson. Born in Mississippi, educated at Emory and Yale, and a Marine Corps veteran of World War I, Malone was editor-in-chief of the scholarly Dictionary of American Biography and wrote a 15,000-word life of Jefferson as part of his editorial duties. From that first scholarly interest, Malone went on to write (between 1948 and 1981) a six-volume work, Jefferson and His Time, that will long stand as the definitive biography of our third president.