Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children

Summary

David McCullough joins his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson to read her acclaimed collection of personal letters from famous American men and women that celebrates the American experience and illuminates the rich history of some of America’s most storied families, available on audio for the first time ever.

Spanning more than three centuries of American history, Posterity is an epistolary collection containing a fascinating glimpse into the hearts and minds of some of America’s most admired figures, as they share enduring lessons in life and love and reveal their character and compassion to their children.

Included here are letters from Thomas Jefferson to his daughter, warning her of the evils of debt; General Patton on D-Day to his son, a cadet at West Point, about what it means to be a good soldier; W.E.B. DuBois to his daughter about character beneath the color of skin; Oscar Hammerstein about why he doesn’t stop working, even after all his success; Woody Guthrie from a New Jersey asylum to nine-year-old Arlo about universal human frailty; sixty-five-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder’s musings about her pioneer childhood; Eleanor Roosevelt chastising her grown son for his Christmas plans; and Groucho Marx as a dog to his twenty-five-year-old son.

Father-daughter team David McCullough and Dorie McCullough Lawson read the thoughts, wisdom, and family lives of those whose public accomplishments have touched us all. Here are renowned Americans as mothers and fathers in their own words and in their own times, as they were seen by their children.