The Revolutionary: Author Lecture with Stacy Schiff

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Samuel Adams was the man with high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, who led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. This is the revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

A book signing and reception with complimentary beer, wine, and hors-d'oeuvres will take place after the lecture. 

This event is part of the 2023 Michelle Smith Lecture Series. Tickets are available only as a three-lecture package.

Member Tickets

In PersonVirtual

General Public Tickets

In PersonVirtualBuy the Book

 
 
The Michelle Smith Lecture Series is supported by an endowment established by a generous grant from the late Robert H. and Clarice Smith.
Add to Calendar 03/15/2023 19:00:00 03/15/2023 20:00:00 America/New_York The Revolutionary: Author Lecture with Stacy Schiff

Samuel Adams was the man with high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, who led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. This is the revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

A book signing and reception with complimentary beer, wine, and hors-d'oeuvres will take place after the lecture. 

This event is part of the 2023 Michelle Smith Lecture Series. Tickets are available only as a three-lecture package.

Member Tickets

In PersonVirtual

General Public Tickets

In PersonVirtualBuy the Book

 
 
The Michelle Smith Lecture Series is supported by an endowment established by a generous grant from the late Robert H. and Clarice Smith.
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Cost

3-Lecture Series:
In-person: $150 for members, $175 for non-members (subscribers will receive the virtual link)
Virtual: $40 for members, $55 for non-members

Location

In-person Attendees:
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Auditorium located in the Mount Vernon Inn complex

Virtual Attendees:
Tune in to our online broadcast

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The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” John Adams thought his cousin “the most sagacious politician” of all. With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd, eloquent, and intensely disciplined man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams packaged and amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool in an innovative arsenal to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.


In The Revolutionary, Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

Stacy Schiff

A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of The Witches: Salem, 1692, which The New York Times hailed as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.” Her previous book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010.

Schiff is also the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2006 George Washington Prize.

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019.

Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Contact

Stephen A. McLeod

Director, Library Programs

703.799.8686

smcleod@mountvernon.org

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