Joseph J. Ellis Audiobooks

A Pulitzer-winning historian on the founding of a republic, in The Quartet

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Who is Joseph J. Ellis?

Joseph J. Ellis, born in 1943, is an American historian who has devoted his career to a single great subject: the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Specialisation on that scale pays off, and in Ellis’s case it paid off in citations – American Sphinx, his study of the character of Thomas Jefferson, won a National Book Award in 1997, and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation took the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001. Both books were bestsellers.

That double act – scholarly prizes and popular sales – is far rarer than it should be, and it tells you exactly what kind of historian Ellis is: one who writes to be read, not merely to be footnoted.

Joseph J. Ellis in audiobooks

American revolutionary history might look like a specialist taste for a UK audience, but there is a decent argument it lands more interestingly on this side of the Atlantic – the founding generation were, after all, rebelling against us. The Quartet, the Ellis title in our catalogue, plays squarely to his strengths: personality, era and the human machinery behind the founding story.

In audio, narrative history of this calibre is an easy recommendation – authoritative enough to trust, vivid enough to follow at walking pace, and short on the throat-clearing that makes lesser histories a chore in headphones.