Pulitzer Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with the country s leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Onuf, to present an absorbing and revealing character study that finally clarifies the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Tracing Jefferson s development and maturation from his youth to his old age, the authors explore what they call the “empire” of Jefferson s imagination his expansive state of mind born of the intellectual influences and life experiences that led him into public life as a modern avatar of the enlightenment, who often likened himself to an ancient figure “the most blessed of the patriarchs."