Author: Joseph J. Ellis

Joseph J. Ellis is an American historian known for narrative studies of the revolutionary generation and the early presidency. His Excellency portrays George Washington as a military commander, landowner, political leader, and reluctant president rather than as a distant national monument. Published by Knopf and later Vintage, the biography draws on the Washington papers to connect private temperament with public judgment. Ellis taught history at Mount Holyoke College and became professor emeritus there. His other major books include American Sphinx, which received the National Book Award, and Founding Brothers, which received the Pulitzer Prize for History. That background places his Washington biography within a larger body of work about the personalities and conflicts that shaped the early United States.