Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks Poems of Nation, Family and Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President Hardback - 2006

Media reviews

"Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks is an elegantly produced and judiciously edited anthology that is sure to interest both academics and well as general readers interested in Jefferson and the history and culture of the early American republic. Jonathan Gross has done a stunning job making sense of a vast trove of texts that illuminate much about Jefferson's sensibility, his sense of taste and politics, and indeed his personal life. Each section is introduced informatively, and the appendices will enlighten all sorts of readers. This book provides the materials with which to think about Jefferson in light of popular culture, Romantic thought, and the larger relations between American and British cultures.
— Philip Gould, Professor of English, Brown University

"Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Burns are among Jefferson's major companions in a previous unrecorded ten-year conversation that will permanently change Jefferson studies. Deeply sensitive to the tensions between the exteriority of neoclassicism and the interiority of romanticism, Jonathan Gross is a masterful editor."
— Jay Fliegelman, author of Declaring Independence

"Thanks to Jonathan Gross's comprehensive annotations and introduction, the Scrapbooks offer even non-specialist readers a variety of fascinating insights into the complexity of Jefferson's inner life."
— Karl Kroeber, Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

"A dramatic glimpse into the mind of Jefferson. In these pages, he emerges as both a casual reader and a political partisan. What did he clip from the newspaper? What poetry stirred him? The cerebral president had a sense of humor and a strikingly sentimental side that can be easily gleaned from this fascinating volume."
— Andrew Burstein, author of Jefferson's Secrets