The Pulitzer Prize for biography went to "American Lion: Andrew Jackson and the White House" by Jon Meacham, it was announced today. The book, our reviewer Robert Roper explains, "comes most startlingly alive when [Meacham] tells the old, amazing story of the ill-educated rube who invented modern politics." Roper continues:
It is a story of American genius (a genius for perpetuating slavery and for removing Indians from their land, as well as for more honorable things). Not that Jackson was all that ill-educated, actually; he read Shakespeare, Plutarch and the Bible, and François Fénelon was a great favorite -- Fénelon being the 17th century French author of "The Adventures of Telemachus," a treatise on Machiavellian governance. Maybe the point is that he gathered from here and there just what he needed, doing at each unexpected step of the way just what his instincts told him. Nathaniel Hawthorne, like other literary men of the time fascinated by Jackson, recorded a story of Jackson getting into a dispute "about eclipses and the planetary systems generally," and "compelling a whole dinner-party of better-instructed people to knock under to him in an argument." Hawthorne concluded, "Surely, he was the greatest man we ever had; and his native strength, as well of intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the [more] cunning . . . the individual . . . it served only to make him the sharper tool."
Meacham, who is the editor of Newsweek magazine, has also written for the L.A. Times. In a review of books on Abraham Lincoln, he wrote, illuminatingly, "the story of a man who becomes a monument is more interesting and instructive than the story of a man who was born one."
Andrew Jackson's momentousness was the subject of Meacham's conversation with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" in November of 2008. That clip is after the jump.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Portrait of Andrew Jackson attributed to Thomas Sully.
Jon Meacham is a terrific example of what a liberal arts education can do for a person. He is an inspirational alumnus of a small Southern university (Sewanee) that instills the disciplines of hard work, stellar scholasticism, eloquent and persuasive argument skills all in the service of educating broadly-grounded students who go on to become engaged citizens in our continuously evolving democracy.
Congratulations to him from a proud fellow Sewanee alum -
Kim Dougherty
Class of 1977
Posted by: Kim Dougherty | April 20, 2009 at 05:43 PM
I am shocked and dismayed that the Pulitzer committee have awarded their prize to Mr. Meacham. The book is a third too long, given his propensity for windily repeating himself and adding meaningless details (in 1832, they were reading by candle-light? Rode 'horseback' ? Jackson rode 'horseback' like a twelve year old girl?) as well as blatant errata (the Capitol dome is called 'not yet complete' in a view circa 1833. It was complete. It was later replaced by today's cast iron dome, but it wasn't like they were dodging raindrops in the rotunda from 1818 until 1860.)
I was dismayed to read the kudos by Goodwin and others on the book jacket. Meacham must have some serious dirt on people, for this hastily-written shambles to take a Pulitzer.
Posted by: Dick Lunde | April 24, 2009 at 10:14 AM