Schiff, Stacy

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.