Add Washington Book Prize to the 'Hemingses' Haul
Historian and author Annette Gordon-Reed has won a literary Triple Crown with her remarkable "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," her 798-page exploration of Thomas Jefferson and the family of slaves with whom he became intimately involved. The book has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and, yesterday, the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, given annually to the "most important new book about America's founding era."
For a decade, Gordon-Reed worked on the new book -- which explores the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Jefferson, and their descendants -- in between day jobs as a professor of law at New York Law School, professor of history at Rutgers University and mother to two teenagers.
We caught up with her by cellphone yesterday, in midtown Manhattan traffic, as she raced from the Pulitzer luncheon in New York to the airport and the evening ceremony at Mount Vernon.
Any surreal moments today?
Certainly sitting in the ceremony with the other people and looking at the list of people who have won it before . . . and the realization that there can't have been many people in this position. It's also surreal, the response to the book, it's just unprecedented. I've heard from people in other parts of my life, cousins, people from high school.
Anybody asking for money?
[Laughter.] Not yet.
Why do so many people care about this, after so much time?
It's a different aspect of a president's life. In this book, it's not just Sally and Tom, but the entire Hemings family. . . .I just got an e-mail this morning from a man saying there were things about the institution of slavery he had not focused on until he read the book. It's new material for people who are not historians, who don't think about slavery as an institution, who are interested in how individuals coped with all this....
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For a decade, Gordon-Reed worked on the new book -- which explores the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Jefferson, and their descendants -- in between day jobs as a professor of law at New York Law School, professor of history at Rutgers University and mother to two teenagers.
We caught up with her by cellphone yesterday, in midtown Manhattan traffic, as she raced from the Pulitzer luncheon in New York to the airport and the evening ceremony at Mount Vernon.
Any surreal moments today?
Certainly sitting in the ceremony with the other people and looking at the list of people who have won it before . . . and the realization that there can't have been many people in this position. It's also surreal, the response to the book, it's just unprecedented. I've heard from people in other parts of my life, cousins, people from high school.
Anybody asking for money?
[Laughter.] Not yet.
Why do so many people care about this, after so much time?
It's a different aspect of a president's life. In this book, it's not just Sally and Tom, but the entire Hemings family. . . .I just got an e-mail this morning from a man saying there were things about the institution of slavery he had not focused on until he read the book. It's new material for people who are not historians, who don't think about slavery as an institution, who are interested in how individuals coped with all this....