The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre

by James Thomas Flexner

hardcover book

Genres: History, Biography, American Revolution, American History

431 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jon Gautier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously researched, full of rich and intimate personal detail, Flexner combines his considerable talents as an historian with a novelist’s flare for drama, comedy, irony and tragedy. He is much harder on Arnold than other historians, but no less convincing. Not meant as a full biography of Arnold, this book instead matches his powerful, difficult, sad, and self-destructive personally against two lives he altered for the worse, his wife Peggy Shippen, and Major André, who hoped to ride Arnold’s treason to his own fame and success. I might not choose this as the first or only book on Arnold to read, but it is an excellent second choice to Wallace or Martin.

[Julie Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole, I enjoyed this account of the lives of Benedict Arnold and Major John Andre, and the betrayal of the this country which led to exile for one and death to the other. The author has done a great deal of research. However, as is often the case with much history, there are accounts which differ from others I have read. I almost didn't read the book at all when, upon reading the new preface for this edition, he referred to Aaron Burr as sleazy. However, I did, and it was an interesting narrative, and worth reading for those interested in knowing about the story of Arnold and Andre. From what I've read, Andre's death was a shame, while Arnold wasn't worth the trouble. And his wife was held to be innocent, although hardly so. A regular soap opera indeed!

[Nicki Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Traitor and the Spy is an excellent non-fiction piece about Arnold and André. Clearly well-researched, it refutes some of the erroneous claims made about the two men over the years and the prose is highly readable and never feels stodgy. The included images add to the text, and overall I found this book both informative and delightful.

[Iver Lofving · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book if you really want to understand these complicated people. It really sets the stage for you, then you begin to understand the tragedy that was the lives of both the Traitor and the Spy!

[P.Wiltse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of fun to read, and Flexner found a significant amount of new information about André's early life, including his actual year of birth, which had been incorrectly reported as 1751 instead of 1750 for nearly 200 years. Thanks Anna Seward. (If you read reviews from when the book first came out in 1953, many of which are available on JSTOR, the reviewers are not terribly impressed by the Benedict Arnold sections - not because they're bad, but because they're nothing new - but they do mention the new information about André.)
Of course part of the reason it's fun to read is that no one told Flexner he needed to calm down, so you do have to pay attention to when he's wildly speculating and when he has actual evidence. Granted this is always true (and it's worse with the D. A. B. Ronald biography because he plays misleading citation games), but it's especially a problem with Flexner, and I've seen other people repeat his speculations uncritically.
The 1953 edition notoriously didn't include sources and required you to write to the publisher for a separate pamphlet containing them, but the 1975 edition - or at least the 1990 reprint - does contain them, though it's often a little hard to tell which source is being cited for what. The nice thing about all the André bios is that many of the sources are so old that they're readily available through Google Books/Internet Archive/Hathitrust/etc, so you can check the sources yourself.
This and the Hatch bio are tied for best starter André biography. (However, if you asked me which biography you should read, I would say "All of them except maybe Tillotson". A single biography isn't really enough if you want to understand someone.)

[Will Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book detailing the true story of a key KGB official spying for the UK during the Cold War and more recently. The book is meticulously researched and the characters are well-developed. The narrative had an excellent structure, building up tension and pace throughout. The last third of the book had be glued to the pages until the early hours, wanting to get to the end to find out what happens. I throroughly enjoyed the book for the quality of the story-telling and for the fascinating insights into the world of real espionage, rather than that fantasies we are usually presented with from less able writers.

[Emg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed without being dense and overly scholarly.