This is an abosrbing re-creation of the life of James A. Garfield, twentieth President of the United States, and a man little known to modern Americans. With the grace of style and penetrating and infinitely careful research evident in her previous Pulitzer-Prize-winning histories, Margaret Leech here shows the tall, handsome Garfield to have been a man of complex and contradictory character, in whom ambition and desire warred with firm principle. Born and raised in poverty in the Western Resreve of Ohio, Garfield was a highly intelligent and devoutly religious self-made man: a teacher; a Disciples of Christ preacher; a distinguished soldier (he rose to the rank of major general in the civil War before resigning to take his seat in Congress); a superb orator; in politics a Radical Republican and arent abolitionist, a leader in the House of Representatives during Reconstruction. In 1880, when he was forth-eight, Senator-elect Garfield was nominated for the presidency by a Republican convention deadlocked among ulysses S. Grant, James G. Blaine, and John Sherman. During the campaign he was subject to violent personal abuse and charges of scandal, and he won the election narrowly. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1881; on July 2, while on his way to attend commencement exercises at Williams College, he was shot down in a Washington railway station. His death on September 19, after long suffering, left not only his young children, his wife, and his mother, but the nation as well in mourning.