This Dover Edition, first published in 1969, is an unabridged republication, with minor corrections, of the work as published in 1947 by Houghton Mifflin Company. There is a new introduction, two new illustrations, and two others have been substituted for those in the original edition.
James Thomas Flexner was an American historian and biographer best known for the four-volume biography of George Washington that earned him a National Book Award in Biography and a special Pulitzer Prize. A cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Flexner worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune from 1929 until 1931, after which he worked as an executive secretary for the New York City Department of Health before leaving the job the following year in order to devote his full energies to writing.