100 Books Like American Sphinx

I’ve never seen a man’s life told with such clarity and skill as Caro lays out LBJ’s journey. I was in awe of how clear-eyed Caro was about what his story is about: not the facts and dates of LBJ’s life, but what Caro saw in LBJ’s life about ambition, politics, and the powers that shape society.

Caro never for a second loses sight of the story he is telling, and what it is truly about: power, how to get it, and how to yield it. Caro’s adherence to the themes he found in LBJ’s story is inspiring—and completely informed how I approach storytelling.

Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin ranks among the top of Isaacson’s excellent biographies.

He provides thorough detail and background of Franklin’s life, examining him through the eyes of the quintessential American: an entrepreneur, a writer, a small businessman, a cosmopolitan, and a statesman (albeit lacking the higher offices). 

Isaacson briefly treats Franklin’s religious views and the reasons why Franklin moved away from the Puritan faith of his forebearers and embraced a creed more akin to deism. 

James Monroe is my favorite Founding Father. He may not be the “indispensable man” like Washington or have penned the most influential words in American history, ”We hold these truths to be self–evident,” but Monroe’s contributions to the United States and American history rank among the most important of the Founding Fathers. 

Per the title, Monroe was the “last” of such influential leaders and the last president in the Virginia dynasty of presidents. Unger provides an excellent, thorough walk-through of Monroe’s life and the influences that shaped his character, as well as the sacrifices Monroe made on behalf of the United States.

Per Unger, Monroe could have used his position and his influence for personal enrichment but regularly turned down such opportunities because he felt these were not worthy of an American leader. In the end, Monroe died with significant debts coupled with a legacy as the last Founding Father. 

Consider Joseph Ellis’ Founding Brothers more of a series of biographies–portraits of great individuals shaping history for the better–of such individuals during the most important period of their lives and in the history of our country.

Ellis’ masterful work focuses on the relationship between the Founding Fathers in the latter half of the eighteenth century, which, as the title suggests, was fraught with all the difficulties and rivalries one might expect as brothers. Figures like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were men not unlike the rest of us, driven by passion, ambition, and the vision to see the American republic become a beacon of hope and freedom for the entire world. 

Yet, these passions and contrary views of the American experiment in self-government, at times, spilled out into the open, and Ellis does a masterful job elucidating the rivalries between these great men and what was at stake… show more.

Onuf, who held the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Chair at the University of Virginia, is the most accomplished student of Jefferson’s thought. In Jefferson’s Empire, Onuf interrogates Jefferson’s thinking about the meaning of the American Revolution. He places Jefferson’s thinking in the context of the Enlightenment showing that his vision of the American future arose from his idealized notions of nationhood and empire. Rather than see the US as the antithesis of empire, Onuf shows that Jefferson believed that Americans should craft a new form of republican empire that he believed would be a model for the rest of the world. Onuf recognizes, as Jefferson didn’t, that this vision depended on enslaved labor and the displacement of Indigenous people and he explores these contradictions. Onuf’s reading of the Declaration of Independence transformed my own thinking about that foundational document.   

Not a biography in the strict sense, this book is an investigation into “an American controversy” by a legal scholar that demonstrates the value of historical research and analysis by showing how Jefferson’s grandchildren, and white scholars and biographers following their lead, effectively conspired to hide the truth of Jefferson’s 30+ relationship with a woman he owned. And Gordon-Reed published this book a full year before the DNA-based analysis showed that Jefferson was overwhelmingly likely to have been the only father to Hemings’s four children.

Next to Franklin, Thomas Jefferson is surely the most inventive, innovative member of the American Revolutionary pantheon. He is known for his powerful formulations of revolutionary ideas—in the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and his inaugural address as third President of the United States. These contributions rested on deep and disciplined study in the human sciences, including history, geography, ethnography, political economy, as well as applied sciences such as horticulture, viticulture, and architecture. In their learned meditation on the life and thought of this most learned of American founders, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf offer a fresh perspective on Jefferson.

In so many ways, he embodied the cutting-edge values of the American Revolution, but Jefferson also embodied the contradictions of the Revolution—particularly as they related to the institution of slavery. Rather than dismiss him as a hypocrite, Gordon-Reed and Onuf set out to explain Jefferson. For… show more.

Steve Berry has built a successful writing career mining interesting nuggets from history and asking a simple what-if question that sends his imagination racing. The seventh Cotton Malone thriller opens with the failed attempt to assassinate President Danny Daniels. Berry links this attempt with the successful, but seemingly unrelated presidential assassinations in 1865, 1881, 1901, and 1963. The historical gold nugget at the heart of The Jefferson Key is a clause in the United States Constitution, contained in Article 1, Section 8. Malone races across the U.S. to break a cipher created by Thomas Jefferson, unravel a mystery concocted by Andrew Jackson, and unearth a document drafted by the Founding Fathers in order to stop the secret society of American pirates.

The study of Jefferson has been dominated by men and has largely focused on politics and Jefferson’s relationships with men. Scharff presents an alternative perspective. She focuses on the women in Jefferson’s life—his mother, sisters, wife, sisters-in-law, daughters, granddaughters, and the enslaved mother of his mixed-race children. The result is an original entry in the vast corpus of books on Jefferson. It’s beautifully written, imbued with sympathy for its subjects. Scharff offers a new perspective on Jefferson but also sheds light on the varied experiences of women of different races and classes in early America. The result is a study about much more than a “Founding Father.”  

Here’s another take on America’s relationship with King George III. The story shows the differences between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson but despite their differences, they have a love of country and a hate for King George. They unite their strengths - John’s power of persuasion and Tom’s mighty pen - to formulate the Declaration of Independence. The endnotes are just as fascinating, talking about how their relationship continued - and almost ended. They both died on the same day, on July 4th.