George Washington Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on George Washington

Few of his contemporaries wrote more than George Washington. One edition of his writings comprises thirty-nine volumes (and there are four more volumes of diaries), and a new edition of his papers should include one hundred volumes before its completion in the twenty-first century. And yet no important American of the Revolutionary era is more ignored as an author. No one would argue he wrote belles lettres, but neither did Thomas Jefferson. No one would argue that his literary talents involved more than the prose compositions of a planter, general, and statesman, but neither did those of James Madison. No one would argue that his writings reflected intellectual inquiry at the cutting edge of contemporary thought, but neither did Alexander Hamilton's famous essays. Yet all these other men's papers place them in the pantheon of early American literary figures, while Washington is usually omitted. Because his writings are so voluminous, because they usually concern the mundane details of public and private administration, and because they reflect the restraint of a man whose every word demanded attention, no important scholar has analyzed the corpus of Washington's writings with the same scholarly insight that Edmund Wilson provided the Civil War generation in his Patriotic Gore.

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