“A gifted storyteller” David McCullough called THOMAS FLEMING who died on July 23 at the age of 90. McCullough added: “He was a man of natural ease with people and with stories.” A prolific novelist and historian, Fleming’s favorite subject was the American Revolution, the struggle he considered essential to understanding the history that followed. I couldn’t agree more.

Of particular interest to readers of this blog is The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (2009) in which he focuses on the women in the lives of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams and Madison. The book provides a wonderful and eminently readable introduction to the often neglected influence of mothers, wives, and lovers of our nation’s founders. To quote Fleming: “Knowing and understanding the women in their lives adds pathos and depth to the public dimensions of the founding fathers’ political journeys. We do them no dishonor when we explore how often public greatness emerged in spite of personal pain and secret disappointment. Far from diminishing these men and women, an examination of their intimate lives will enlarge them for our time. In their loves and losses, their hopes and fears, they are more like us than we have dared to imagine.”