Edith Gelles
Just in time for George Washington’s birthday: Edith B. Gelles Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage has been named one of three finalists for the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize — the largest prize for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind. The judges noted that Gelles’s book is “not only a lively telling of a most important chapter in our nation’s history, but also – and appropriately – a romance.” Gelles began her research into the Adamses over thirty years ago and is the author of Abigail: Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (1992), a co-winner of the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award, and Abigail Adams: A Writing Life (1998), an examination of Abigail’s life through her letters.
The two other finalists are Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution and R.B. Bernstein’s The Founding Fathers Reconsidered. The winner will be named at a May 20 celebration at Mount Vernon.
Gelles wrote about the colonial “power couple” last year in a Daily Beast article here.
