The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
Professor Bailyn has written a biography that is a work of art: exquisitely written, delicate in insight, and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true hallmark of a great historian. (J. H. PlumbTimes Literary Supplement)As political biography,The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinsonis without equal in the voluminous literature on the Revolution. No other public figure of the Revolution has found such skillful and sensitive attention. (Jack P. GreeneHistory)Writing this kind of history requires discipline, imagination, and sensitivity,  and it presupposes that there is an inner world of intellect and of moral and emotional sensibility which is intimately responsive to external events... His probing, taut yet luminous prose weaves together into a single fabric finished explanations, analyses of evidence, flashes of insight, and intuitive understandings. A triumph of historical and literary artistry...The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinsonis that rare achievement which is at once original and nearly definitive, masterful and provocative. (Robert M. CalhoonReviews in American History)