Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind

An analysis of Thomas Jefferson's struggles with depression and mental illness notes the periods of "gloomy foreboding" that overshadowed his life before he successfully worked to overcome his fears, which enabled him to make many of his historic contributions. Beran here explores Jefferson's attitudes and emotions toward life. The author's inherently elusive target, Jefferson's interior monologue, so to speak, begets an occasionally ethereal discourse deriving from a profound influence on Jefferson's outlook, neoclassicism. Its fixation on decay lodged deeply within Jefferson, changing over his stages of life but never absent from them. Beran examines most closely what Jefferson probably regarded as one of his most ecstatic experiences, a 1787 Grand Tour of Roman ruins in France and Italy, which he broke off before reaching Rome itself. Why? Perhaps he heeded the inner voices of a competing philosophy on living that Beran draws from his reading of Jefferson's letters, sentimentalism. Contemporaneously to the trip, it had poured out in his giddy letters to Maria Cosway, who was Jefferson's opposite (Catholic rather than skeptic; artistic rather than rational), which, Beran ventures, made her unwinnable. It's no surprise that Beran discovers a complicated Jefferson; the sophistication of his presentation will intrigue readers of ruminative bent. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Arthur Herman author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World Michael Knox Beran gives us a Thomas Jefferson we have not met before. This is not the intrepid Founding Father and sage from Monticello, or the slave-owning ravisher of Sally Hemings. This is Jefferson in flesh and blood, in mind and soul, a man haunted by the sights, smells, ideas, obsessions, of his own age. Michael Beran has given us a book of brilliance and imagination. -- Review Michael Knox Beran was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1966. He is the author of a book about Robert Kennedy, The Last Patrician , a New York Times Notable Book of 1998. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The New Yorker . A graduate of Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale Law School, he is a lawyer, and he lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and daughter.