George Washington: A Biography

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948-54. First edition. Total of 94 illustrations, 53 maps, and 2 musical scores. Octavo. Six volumes. Publisher's full blue cloth stamped and ruled in gilt on spine. Vol. I: xxvi, 549, 13 illustrations, 5 maps; Vol. II: vi, 464, 12 illustrations, 3 maps; Vol. III: xxxvi, 599, 15 illustrations, 6 maps; Vol. IV: viii, 736, 15 illustrations, 24 maps; Vol. V: xvi, 570, 14 illustrations, 12 maps, 2 musical scores; Vol. VI: xlv, 529, 20 illustrations, 3 maps. Vol. 5 and 6 have fading on gilt, edge-wear to cloth, pressed corners, light scratching to cloth covers, light scratching to text blocks. Overall, very good copies.

Douglas Southall Freeman's George Washington ranks among the most exhaustive lives written of any American, issued by Charles Scribner's Sons across nearly a decade. Freeman, for years editor of the Richmond News Leader, and already a Pulitzer winner for his four-volume R. E. Lee, took up Washington as his last work, leaving journalism in 1949 to give it his full attention. He carried over the "fog of war" method of the Lee: presenting events only as far as Washington himself could have known them at a given moment, so the reader follows his judgment forming rather than reading back from the outcome. The effect was to loosen a figure long stiffened into monument, restoring a Washington who was fallible and deliberate, an improbably successful commander against the British and, afterward, a careful steward of an untried republic. His contemporaries did not stint their regard; the historian Allan Nevins reckoned him "America's greatest biographer."

The completed work would go on to receive the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, Freeman's second, awarded after his death. Each of the six volumes is a first printing, carrying the Scribner's seal and the letter "A" on the copyright page, and the text is illustrated throughout with frontispieces, plates, and maps.