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Stacy Schiff dazzles us again, this time with the forgotten story of an American  original. In her distinctive voice, Schiff restores Samuel Adams to the pantheon of the most influential  Founding Fathers on the 300th anniversary of his birth\u2014and at a time when democracy appears  especially fragile. Thomas Jefferson once asserted that if there was one leader of the Revolution, \u201cSamuel Adams was the  man.\u201d Without him, his cousin John said, \u201cthe true history of the American Revolution can never be  written.\u201d A humble hero, a man of sterling integrity and deep faith yet a failed businessman who was  adrift for the first act of his life, Samuel Adams stands among the most successful revolutionaries of all  time. But despite his celebrated status among his contemporaries, he has largely vanished from the record. Convinced that liberty and self-determination were essential rights, he led an ingenious, egalitarian  campaign of civil resistance against England. Organizing boycotts and massaging the news, churning out  propaganda under an army of pseudonyms\u2014some of them newly uncovered by Schiff\u2014Adams arguably  did more to bring about independence than any other Founder.

Stacy Schiff is the author of V\xe9ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the  Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exup\xe9ry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation:  Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington  Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, a New York  Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd  Weld Award for Biography; and, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692.  Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the  National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars  and Writers at the New York Public Library. A NYPL Library Lion, a recipient  of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of  Arts and Letters, named a Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the  French government, she has contributed to the New York Times, The New  Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. A  member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York  City.  For more information, please visit www.stacyschiff.com