When Mason Locke Weems published his notorious biography of George Washington at the turn of the nineteenth century, he signaled the nationalistic spirit of a new country working to record--and embellish, if need be--a heritage that would unite Americans. In his 1947 study of bestsellers, Frank Luther Mott names Benjamin Franklin 's Autobiography and Weems's The Life of George Washington the most popular pieces of historical reading in the early days of the United States. Daniel J. Boorstin has called Weems's work "perhaps the most widely read, most influential book ever written about American history." In terms of American children's literature, Weems set in place the hagiographical approach to life writing that would be the rule in biography written for children throughout the 1800s. Strongly moralistic as well, Weems's life of the first president reads like the historical counterpart of a Horatio Alger tale: a story of the dramatic...