Cincinnatus; George Washington and the Enlightenment

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1984. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxvi, 272, [6] pages. List of Illustrations. Illustrations (some in color). Key to Brief Citations. Bibliographical essay. Index. DJ has some soiling, wear, tears and chips. Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is an American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993. Wills has written nearly forty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History. Wills began his career as a protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. and was associated with conservatism. He is self-admittedly conservative, being regarded for a time as the "token conservative" for the National Catholic Reporter and writing a book entitled Confessions of a Conservative. By investigating the interest Washington's contemporaries had in him, and by playing that interest off against some of the perennial problems of political morality and the uses of power, Wills gives us a fresh perspective on our first President. He shows how Washington solved the problem of charismatic leadership by embodying the eighteenth-century Enlightenment idea: the creation of a revived classical republic. People responded to such leadership in verse, sermons, songs, paintings, and sculpture. In Wills's hands art history becomes a new kind of political science. He finds forgotten messages in Parson Weems's account of Washington; he traces the use of classical images to such unsuspected places as the carving of American eagles and the disposition of Washington's hands in Greenough's notorious statue of the first President. The great actions of Washington are seen afresh.