He's currently working on books about George Washington's family in American culture and about the ways Americans imagined their First Families before radio and television. Weems, like Morris, was embroiled in culture wars of his day. The reverend author of this book before us, which we are at a loss whether to denominate a biography, or a novel, founded on fact, has presented a specimen of writing, which for variety and oddity is almost an unique in the annals of literature.
Biographies make strange bedfellows.
Or at least the controversies over them do. The fracas over Dutch united journalists and academics, liberals and conservatives, onetime Reagan staffers and longtime Reagan detractors. Most critics claimed that the flap revealed more about contemporary culture wars than about Ronald Reagan, but few observed that it marked a shift in how we think about biography itself. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, Weems's name meant something different to American readers. His work provided patriotic inspiration to generations of young Americans.