Jefferson in His Own Time, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, will be available Sept. 1, from the Writers in Their Own Time series of the University of Iowa Press.

This volume collects 30 accounts of Thomas Jefferson written by his granddaughters, visiting dignitaries, fellow politicians, and others who knew him as a family man, public servant, intellectual, and institution builder. The letters and reminiscences of those who knew Jefferson personally reveal him to be a warm, funny man, quite unlike the solemn statesman so often limned in biographies.

To friends and enemies alike he was the model of a republican gentleman, profoundly knowledgeable in philosophy and natural history, able to converse in several languages, and capable of great wit but contemptuous of ceremony and fancy dress. Through these excerpts, we can see the nation’s third president as his family knew him—a loving husband, father, and grandfather—and as his peers did, as a tireless public servant with a fondness for tall tales.

Keith Thomson, the author of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History, notes, “Thomas Jefferson today has many detractors. Kevin Hayes has collected a wealth of contemporary anecdotes to reveal instead the wonderfully human, charming, self-deprecating, and unexpectedly witty side of the third president’s complex personality.”

Hayes is a professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. His books include An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887; The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson; The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas; and The Library of William Byrd of Westover, for which he received the Virginia Library History Award. In addition, he has coedited, with Isabelle Bour, Franklin in His Own Time for the UI Press.

Providing the best first-hand accounts—published and unpublished, adulatory and critical—written by both famous and forgotten contemporaries, the Writers in Their Own Time series makes the lives of American writers better understood and more accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

The book will be available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com. This volume is also available as an eBook.