Stacy Schiff With David S. Brown: A Conversation

David S. Brown is the author of several books, including The Last American Aristocrat, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Brown’s timely The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson (Scribner) positions the seventh U.S. president firmly in the forefront of the country’s populist tradition. Jackson rose from rural poverty to become the dominant figure in American politics between Jefferson and Lincoln. His reputation, however, defies easy description. A self-defined champion of “farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” Jackson railed against the established ruling order – fostering a brand of democracy that struck a chord with the common man – while also taking a prominent role in removing Native American peoples from their ancestral lands. Brown examines Jackson’s public career, including the momentous Battle of New Orleans, the far-reaching Bank War, Jackson’s marriage to an already married woman, and his deadly duel with a Nashville dandy, and analyzes his magnetic hold on much of the country at the time. The First Populist connects Jackson and his legacy to a history of division, dissent, and partisanship that has come to define our current times.

Stacy Schiff is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov); Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America; Cleopatra: A Life; and The Witches: Salem, 1692. In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (Little, Brown and Company), Schiff looks at the high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics Adams used to lead what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. The book returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to a shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. Adams packaged and amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool in an innovative arsenal to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. In doing so, he became the most wanted man in America: Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775 to warn him that he was about to be arrested for treason. Schiff brings her skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from the aimless son of a well-off family to a tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies.