President George Washington Books

Leather bound books on President George Washington published by the Easton Press as special collector editions. These titles include works about George Washington that may or may not have been included in the Easton Press Library of Presidents.

Easton Press books:
The Washington Papers by Saul K. Padover - 1989
George Washington a Biography by John Alden - 1993
Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman - 1995
George Washington 4 volume set by James Thomas Flexner
Includes the following volumes: 
The Forge Experience 1732-1775
In the American Revolution 1775-1783
And the New Nation 1783-1793
Anguish and Farewell 1793-1799

 

George Washington biography by John Richard Alden
In this highly acclaimed and enduring biography, John R. Alden traces the interwoven histories of George Washington and the nation he helped to create, defend, and guide toward the future. Alden revisits the major events of Washington’s personal and professional life, including his boyhood in rural Virginia, his early careers as a surveyor and then a soldier in the French and Indian War, and his staid but lasting marriage. The core of the biography concerns Washington’s leadership roles and his assumption of the post of commander in chief of the Continental Army, his part in the Constitutional Convention, and his presidency. As Alden reveals, Washington’s greatness lay in his total devotion to the cause of the American nation and in his wisdom as a leader.


George Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman
Washington is the most complete, definitive one-volume biography of George Washington ever written. In 1948 renowned biographer and military historian Douglas Southall Freeman won his second Pulitzer Prize for his new and dramatic reexamination of George Washington. For years biographies had gone from idolatry to muckraking in their depictions of this somewhat marbleized Founding Father. Freeman’s new interpretation was a fresh step, making Washington a living, breathing individual, flawed but heroic. An able commander who defeated the British Empire against incredible odds, Washington proved to be just as adept at wielding political power, and adroitly steered our new loosely called nation through the first stormy years of our unproven federal stewardship and the first two presidential administrations.


The Forge of Experience, 1732-1775
In this deeply significant work, James Thomas Flexner has given life to the stony image of George Washington, which stares at us so impersonally from Mount Rushmore , the dollar bill, and the schoolroom wall.

With a clear, swiftly readable style, Flexner shows the wholly human way in which the character of one of the greatest men in history was shaped and how it, in turn, shaped his achievements. Able and energetic, impulsive and vulnerable, Washington from the first had major virtues but he was also fallible.

Put into a position of leadership in the French-Indian conflict at the age of twenty-two a position for which he was not yet ready the young Lieutenant Colonel initiated actions which showed more bravery than good judgment. His hasty attack in the forest, on what the French insisted was a party escorting an ambassador, proved to be the first show fired in the global Seven Years' War. Yet each mistake and success of these early years was part of the vast experience which ultimately molded Washington into what Flexner calls "one of the noblest and greatest men who ever lived," a man prepared to become, during the American Revolution, "more than a military leader: he was the eagle, the standard, the flag, the living symbol of the cause."

Flexner covers forty-three years of Washington's life in this volume, the first of a series of three planned to carry Washington through the Revolutionary War and on to the end of his life.

Vivid on the one hand and factually solid on the other, Flexner's narrative absorbingly shows us the future hero as a callow youth writing bad verse and in love with love. We see the era and the society which formed Washington and the individuals who mattered to him: his mother, who became an obdurate squatter on the farm he inherited; his beloved and ailing older brother, Lawrence, who married into the distinguished Fairfax family; George William Fairfax, who, in turn, married Sally Cary; and Sally, who stirred in Washington such forbidden ardor that twenty-five years later he could write her that none of the great events of his career, "nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest of my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.

But it was Martha Custis, the handsome, domestic, timid and loyal widow he married, who brought the future President that happiness of a serener order which made "domestic enjoyments" at Mount Vernon an effective counterpoise throughout his career, to ambition in the world of fame.

Impeccably researched, this work quotes directly from Washington's letters, diaries and documents in presenting the most engrossing biography yet of the Father of our Country.


George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775-1783
History has blinded us to the all-too-human character of George Washington; in doing so, it has blinded us to the true nature of his greatness. We have urgent need to know this man we call the Father of Our Country. And now, at last, James Thomas Flexner has given us the biography that fully meets our need.


George Washington and the New Nation, 1783-1793
This book begins with Washington's return to Mount Vernon, a victorious, but exhausted soldier eagerly seeking the pleasures of a quiet country life. Free of heavy responsibilities, his character expands in genial, often unexpected ways. All too soon, however, the idyll is broken. This promises to be the biography of Washington that will best serve our generation.


George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799
History has blinded us to the all-too-human character of George Washington; in doing so, it has blinded us to the true nature of his greatness. We have urgent need to know this man we call the Father of Our Country. And now, at last, James Thomas Flexner has given us the biography that fully meets our need.