John Paul Jones

Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy

Evan Thomas

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451603996
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The New York Times bestseller from master biographer Evan Thomas brings to life the tumultuous story of the father of the American Navy. John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in harm's way." Evan Thomas's minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones's Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel.Drawing on Jones's correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—Thomas's biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones's spirit was classically American.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction “My Desire for Fame Is Infinite”
• Chapter One “You Meet a Gentleman”
• Chapter Two “That Great Misfortune”
• Chapter Three “Proof of Madness”
• Chapter Four “Determined at All Hazards”
• Chapter Five “Delicate Notions of Honor”
• Chapter Six “A Rash Thing”
• Chapter Seven “Officer of Fine Feelings”
• Chapter Eight “Lay It in Ashes”
• Chapter Nine “We’ve Got Her Now!”
• Chapter Ten “No Sooner Seen Than Lost”
• Chapter Eleven “Caressed by All the World”
• Chapter Twelve “The Gale Still Increasing”
• Chapter Thirteen “Cover Him With Kisses”
• Chapter Fourteen “Conquer or Die”
• Chapter Fifteen “The Ghost of Himself”
• Epilogue “Envy of the World”
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Newspapers and Journals
• Index
• Photo Credits
• About the Author