This list does not include all the reading I did before starting TJRM in late 2009.
I also did much focused browsing through many other titles, including cookbooks, coffee table books about Monticello and its contents, and other misc. titles, including "Jefferson Vindicated," the self-published and unconvincing critique of Annette Gordon Reed's and others' research on the Hemings family.
Throughout the novel, I was true to historic events in TJ's and his family's life except for a few details here and there that became elements in the plot, such as the correspondence between himself and his wife, which I believe are obviously fictional elements. Otherwise, I remained true to the sense of the man I developed over many months of careful reading.
He was usually cool as a cucumber, if not arrogant and haughty, but he was a passionate and emotional man who easily fooled himself for all his brilliance.

A YEAR AT MONTICELLO – 1795; Donald Jackson, Fulcrum
(See pp35-36 freckles admonition to Polly; smothering obsessive love)


JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME, 6 volumes, Dumas Malone, 1948 – 1981, Little Brown
Jefferson the Virginia, Vol 1, appendix on Walker Affair p. 449) MALONE dismisses Sally story but is the one who established that TJ was at Monticello 9 months before each of her births.
SCENE of TJ breaking down in tears at Board of Visitors meeting with students, page 466 of "Sage of Monticello"; appendix info on the Walker affair, including Walker's affidavit.


JEFFERSON HIMSELF, Bernard Mayo, 1942, Riverside Press
Collected extracts of TJ writings from youth to old age. Wishes trees at Monticello were full grown; mockingbirds has superior beings who haunt …)p180


THOMAS JEFFERSON & SALLY HEMINGS: An American Controversy, Annette Gordon-Reed, 1997, UVa Press
Historiography: critique of how the Sally Hemings matter was handled for 150 years
Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson, Edited Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, 1999, University Press of Virginia
Historiography includes Annette Gordon Reed’s “The Memories of a Few Negroes”

THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO, An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed, 2008, WW Norton
How common light skinned children were around the slaves quarters and in the house; how common it was in Virginia for plantation masters to have sex with slaves;
Jamie Hemings White House job offer, suicide


THOMAS JEFFERSON Fawm M Brodie, 1974, WW Norton
First historian to credit the Sally Hemings story
“without Virtue happiness cannot be” p434


THE ADAMS-JEFFERSON LETTERS, Lester Cappon, editor, 1959, UNC Press
Letters about death and returning to hover over his family

THE ROAD TO MONTICELLO, Kevin J. Hayes, Oxford U Press, 2008. Complex portrait of a complex man who called "delicious" the painting he bought in Europe and that still hangs at Monticello, "Sarah Presenting Hagar to Abraham."

AMERICAN SPHINX: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Ellis, 1996, Vintage
“Understanding” of revolutionary generation that southerners would work out the slavery issue themselves – violated by the Missouri Debate; transference of good vs evil forces to the South and opponents of slavery. “He was linking his legacy to the destruction of the republic he helped create.”
Sally story: consensus it is almost certainly not true; (Ellis later admitted he had been in error).

GARY WILLS TALK at UVA on YouTube: TJ as head of theVirgina cabal that controlled government for 32 years, based on his book "The Negro President."


VISITORS TO MONTICELLO, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, University Press of Virginia, 1989
Personal accounts of seeing TJ at Monticello; running into a just-arrived British man TJ had hired to be a prof. at UVA. TJ's first words to him were: "You're awfully young, aren't you?" Commentery about TJ's tendency to seem aloof and cool and then intemperately enthusiastic in conversation after warming up.


JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO Edited by James A Bear Jr. 1967 UVA press
Edmund Bacon and Isaac Jefferson memoirs, TJ’s use of whip – threatening field workers; temper with a stubborn horse (I think these are in here)

Library of America: THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, Thomas Jefferson
Includes assertions about orangutans preferring black women to their own kind

THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF TJ, Sarah N. Randolph,1978 UVA Press, reprint of 1871 memoir
TJ’s great granddaughter: …reminiscences and letters “as being the most faithful witnesses of the warmth of his affections, the elevation of his character, and the scrupulous fidelity with which he discharged the duties of every relation in life.”

SALLY HEMINGS, Barbara Chase-Riboud, 1979, novel
I SCRUPULOUSLY AVOIDED READING ANY OF THIS while writing tj

JEFFERSONS SECRETS: Death and Desire at Monticello, Andrew Burstein, 2005,
beliefs about the body and mind and nerves; the importance of sex. Epicurean: happiness in terms of sensations. The art of living. Pursuit of bodily health and removal of bodily pain. “It is more than a little curious that he deliberately hi is chronic diarrhea from his immediate family for years.”

THE NEGRO PRESIDENT: Gary Wills, 2003, Houghton Mifflin
The 3/5 clause as political weapon that allowed the south to dominate national politics
“My Jefferson is a giant, but a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net.” P.xvii

TWILIGHT AT MONTICELLO, Alan Pell Crwford,2008, Random House. Jeff Randolph's education and future standing cut short by TJ to keep him tied to the task of managing Monticello. See TJ's comment to him on page 160 on paperback edition just above break. "Had you been educated, you would have been entitled to a place" in his first tier of portraits instead of the second.