National book Award laureate; recipient of Special Pulitzer Prize
citation; winner of the Life in America Prize the Archives of
American Art Award; among many others, James Thomas Flexner has
written with distinction about American history and art. He has
penetrated many of the charactrers who have shaped history exposing
the intricacies of not only the historical figure, but the man
beneath the marble image. The range of Flexner's subjects is wide:
painters, inventors, doctors, loyalists, traitors, and spies, such
luminaries as George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Alexander
Hamilton, and John Singleton Copley, are among those Flexner has
taken as subjects. After over fifty years of writnig, Flexner, one
of America's greatest chroniclers has turned his probing eye back
on to the pages of his own life with the same honesty, frankness,
wit which have come to signify his form. James Thomas Flexner was
born in 1908 on Lexington Avenue, New York City to parents Helen
Thomas and Simon Flexner (scientist and first director of the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical research.) Published in the
literary magazine at the Lincoln High School, Flexner's passion for
writing was spawned at a young age. This passion would become a
source of life long struggle as well as success for Flexner.
Journalist for the Herald Tribune, and foremost biographer (as well
as making numerous appearances on radio and television,) Flexner's
career allowed him access into the quick of the political, social,
and artistic movements and developments that shaped the twentieth
century. An un-traditional student, Flexner, although graduating
magna com laude from Harvard University, often pursued what was to
be considered by academics, unorthodox methods of research for his
work. Following the passion of his own interests and plotting his
own course of research and study, Flexner created of himself a sort
of maverick, chartign a course for biography that countered that
written in the guide books of academe. While he probed and
uncovered the lives of the great men who shaped the past,
noteworthy publishers, writers, artists, and politicians of the
twentieth century fill the pages of Maverick's Progress. Flexner
writes of how influences, acquantances, and friends such as Bernard
Berenson, Conrad Aiken, Ivy Lee, Harry Hopkins, Allan Nevins, Logan
Pearsall Smith, and Edward Hopper figured in his life, and in his
development as a writer. James Flexner has authored more than
twenty books, several of them have been recently re-published by
Fordham University Press. He was awarded the Gold Medal for
Eminence in Biography, by the American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters in 1988. He is perhaps most well known for his
four-volume biography of George Washington which was eventually
condensed into one: An Indispensable Man from which two television
mini-series have been produced and for which he was awared the
Peabody Award and Emmy Nomination. Maverick's Progress offers us a
candid an sparkling look into the life of a writer who has indeed
been a maverick in the canon of American historians - an individual
who himself has been an Indispensable Man.
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