Books, Arts & Manners: Antique Virtues

David Humphreys’s “Life of General Washington,” edited by Rosemarie Zagarri (University of Georgia Press, 216 pp., $24.95)

THIS BIOGRAPHY of George Washington is not the best. Still less is it the most historically significant (that honor probably belongs to Parson Weems’s). It was never even finished. But part of it was published, anonymously, in 1789; it had the sanction of its subject, who let the author live in his house and wrote several hundred words of notes and revisions to the text. It’s the closest thing we have to an eighteenth-century Why Not the Best?

David Humphreys’s “Life of General Washington,” edited by Rosemarie Zagarri (University of Georgia Press, 216 pp., $24.95)

THIS BIOGRAPHY of George Washington is not the best. Still less is it the most historically significant (that honor probably belongs to Parson Weems’s). It was never even finished. But part of it was published, anonymously, in 1789; it had the sanction of its subject, who let the author live in his house and wrote several hundred words of notes and revisions to the text. It’s the closest thing we have to an eighteenth-century Why Not the Best?