• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• 1. Meditations and Contemplations


• 2. Every Boy His Own Teacher


• 3. Exemplars


• 4. Travel Writing


• 5. The Journal of Major George Washington


• 6. A Memorial Containing a Summary View of Facts


• 7. Home and Garden


• 8. George Washington, Bibliographer


• 9. The Education of John Parke Custis


• 10. Revolutionary Pamphlets


• 11. Common Sense and Independence


• 12. A Green Baize Bookcase


• 13. Planning for Retirement


• 14. Haven of History


• 15. The Slave, the Quaker, and the Panopticon


• 16. Politics and the Picaresque


• 17. Presidential Patronage and the Development of American Literature


• 18. Official Letters to the Honorable American Congress


• 19. Farewell Address


• 20. Home at Last


• Notes


• Sources


• Index

Kevin J. Hayes, Emeritus Professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several books including The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (OUP, 2008) and A Journey through American Literature (OUP, 2012).

Revered as a general and trusted as America's first elected leader, George Washington is considered a great many things in the contemporary imagination, but an intellectual is not one of them. In correcting this longstanding misconception, George Washington: A Life in Books offers a stimulating literary biography that traces the effects of a life spent in self-improvement.