Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book Award New York Times Bestseller #1 on Esquire's List of the 50 Best Biographies of All Time "[A] commanding and important book." -Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

This epic work-named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times-tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826.