In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers, Gordon Wood asks ‘What made these men great?’ and shows us, among many other things, just how much character did in fact matter. The life of each, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Paine, is presented individually as well as collectively, but the thread that binds these portraits together is the idea of character as a lived reality. They were members of the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made men who understood that the arc of lives, as of nations, is one of moral progress. "Of those writing about the founding fathers, [Gordon Wood] is quite simply the best." —The Philadelphia Inquirer