Scandalmonger

Summary

Our press-hounded Founding Fathers star in an outrageous, fact-based novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist William Safire.

The year is 1797. Meet James Thomson Callender, a radical newspaper editor secretly on the payroll of presidential hopeful Thomas Jefferson. As a political opposition forms in our fledgling republic, Callender is hard at work starting an equally rich American tradition: muckraking journalism. His sensational exposés of the private lives of public men will come to alter the course of history and may cost him his life.

In a gripping and timely work of historical fiction, William Safire unveils the story behind the nation’s first great political scandals. With dialogue drawn from letters and historical records and notes that scrupulously separate fact from fiction, Safire’s novel is studded with masterly portraits of George Washington, John Adams, and Aaron Burr.