Richard Brookhiser

American journalist, historian, and biographer best known for accessible studies of the founding generation (Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Gouverneur Morris). In the wiki he appears as the author of Founders’ Son, his study of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong effort to understand and inherit the Founding Fathers.

Brookhiser’s method in Founders’ Son is explicitly modeled as “training — in thinking, feeling, and acting”: he treats the book not as a full biography but as “the history of a career, and the unfolding of the ideas that animated it,” arguing that watching how Lincoln engaged the founders teaches the reader how to engage both the founders and Lincoln.

Where this appears

• Founders’ Son — Brookhiser’s intellectual biography of Lincoln as heir to the founders.