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Historian potrayed imperfect patriots
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 4/17/01
The judges surely couldn't have been planning it this way, but it's fitting that professor Joseph J. Ellis of Mount Holyoke College won the Pulitzer Prize for history on Patriots Day.
After all, his book, "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation," is a study of -- and tribute to -- the original American patriots: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Aaron Burr.
"It is an advantage to be writing about what is probably the most impressive group of political leaders we've ever had," said Ellis, who learned of yesterday's prize while jogging around a nearby lake.
In "Founding Brothers," Ellis chronicles the first decade of the republic through the founders' arguments, decisions, and improvisations. He took care, he says, to portray them as human beings with foibles and flaws, and not as the flat, distant figures in oil paintings and textbooks.
"One of the reasons it's `Founding Brothers' instead of `Founding Fathers' is that fathers are distant, aloof, omniscient, and, in the end, endlessly hated. And brothers are closer to us," Ellis said. "We're ready to get to know them as they really were, not as a group of icons or a group of demigods."
Ellis, 57, has experience bringing historical figures to life. His bestseller about Thomas Jefferson, "American Sphinx," won the National Book Award in 1997. Like "Founding Brothers," it was written in longhand, with a medium- point rollerball pen ("not," Ellis points out, "a quill.")
"The initial process of trying to create history, for me, has to be tactile," he said. "I create those cadences best when I'm moving my hand."
Ellis has lived through history himself, as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964, and a platoon leader in the Vietnam War. A native Virginian, he holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and Yale University. He taught at the US Military Academy at West Point before joining the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1972. He lives in Amherst with his wife, and has three sons.
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