John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy

The New York Times bestseller from master biographer Evan Thomas brings to life the tumultuous story of the father of the American Navy.

John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, “in harm’s way.” Evan Thomas’s minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel.

Drawing on Jones’s correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—Thomas’s biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones’s spirit was classically American.

Evan Thomas is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers JOHN PAUL JONES, SEA OF THUNDER, and FIRST: SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. He appears regularly on many TV and radio talk shows. Thomas has taught at Harvard and Princeton.

ISBN: 9780743258043
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: May 10, 2004

Nathaniel Philbrick The New York Times Book Review A penetrating biography...an adventure story....Part George Patton, part Jesse James, Jones was, as it turns out, a perfect American hero.The Washington Post Every sentence is written with grace and style....Thomas opens a window on the squalid, demeaning, and hazardous milieu of eighteenth-century mariners and provides unsurpassed descriptions of naval battles.Chicago Sun-Times His stirring accounts of Jones's sea battles will delight those who loved Patrick O'Brian's novels about Capt. Jack Aubrey and C. S. Forester's tales of Horatio Hornblower.