This is the first attempt in nearly fifty years at a comprehensive bibliography of the writings about Thomas Jefferson, and it is the first critically annotated comprehensive bibliography ever to appear. In view of the immense number of pages that have been devoted to Jefferson since his death, this should come as no surprise; as early as the 1940's a scholar as good as William Peden confessed to being daunted by the enormous amount of material that had already appeared. Although this bibliography contains nearly two and a half times as many entries as any previous effort, it refrains from calling itself complete, settling for the more realistic term, comprehensive. Bibliographies are seldom ever complete; they merely await the inevitable appearance of the undiscovered material. Given these metaphysical limits to bibliography, however, this work aims to present the fullest map yet of the scholarly and popular reception of Thomas Jefferson, a man of no narrow scope himself.

The first major attempt to cover the material on Jefferson appeared in 1905 when Richard Holland Johnston included his bibliography as a supplement to the final volume of the Writings of Thomas Jefferson edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh. Johnston's was a fine piece of scholarship, especially on the years from Jefferson's death in 1826 through the remainder of the nineteenth century; although his listings are augmented here, nearly everything he described came to light just as he described it. Not all the bibliographies I consulted were so unfailingly accurate. W. Harvey Wise, Jr., and John W. Cronin brought out their Bibliography of Thomas Jefferson in 1935 with 1,248 citations, but this turned out to be only a relatively modest update of Johnston and overlooked a good deal of material. Neither of these bibliographies is annotated. Still, Wise and Cronin must be regarded as the last attempt, if an unsuccessful one, at a genuinely comprehensive listing of the material on Jefferson.

The next attempt at an extensive bibliography was Eugene L. Huddleston's Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Guide which appeared in 1982 and cited approximately 1,400 items with annotations. Although the author claims in his preface to be "comprehensive," the definition of comprehensiveness as well as the actual practice undermines that claim. This bibliography purports to focus on "all major scholarship" but in fact admits a fair amount of popular material which supposedly is "mostly excluded," and it overlooks a considerable body of scholarly material, particularly that having to do with Jefferson's interests in science, the arts, and architecture. Influenced by Merrill Peterson's The Jefferson Image in the American Mind , it swerves from strictlyscholarly criteria for inclusion out of a desire to depict Jefferson's reputation, particularly along the lines Peterson had laid out. This leads to the inclusion of peripheral material, or at least material considered too peripheral for inclusion in this bibliography. (This is probably no serious flaw, for defining the limits of inclusion is one of the most difficult problems in creating a bibliography, and a cautious generosity is often more useful than overly scrupulous discrimination. The items this reference guide doesn't include pose a more serious problem.) Since the annotations "aim at objectivity," however, it is often difficult to separate the peripheral and popular from the more scholarly and central. A few errors in bibliographic description, e.g., confusion of author's names, of editions, etc., also occur.

There are also a number of other bibliographies, often accompanying scholarly monographs, which have proved useful. Especially worth noticing is William B. O'Neal's An Intelligent Interest in Architecture covering material dealing with Jefferson as an architect, and since it includes items that merely refer to Jefferson in passing and are thus not included here, it is useful as a guide to the growing recognition of his importance in architectural history. Also, Peterson's Jefferson Image includes a "Guide to Sources" that is a treasury of references to items charting the course of Jefferson's reputation, and like O'Neal's book it lists items that only allude to Jefferson and are not listed here. Its usefulness is limited, however, by its offering incomplete and sometimes erroneous bibliographic information for its references.

This bibliography, then, provides the most comprehensive coverage to date of the writing about Jefferson from his death to the present. Earlier bibliographers paid not a great deal of attention to items in languages other than English. Although I am least confident about comprehensiveness in regard to foreign language material, I did turn up items in sixteen languages besides English. In addition to earlier bibliographies, I have consulted a wide variety of indexes covering publications in biography, the humanities and social sciences, law, education, and fine arts; guides to periodical literature; and specialized scholarly bibliographies such as Writings in American History and the MLA Bibliography . I have consulted the holdings of the Harvard libraries, Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, the Cornell University Library, Princeton University Library, the library of the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia Library, and the Virginia State Historical Society Library, turning up valuable and interesting material in all of these. Stack access to a number of these libraries allowed me to find material not listed in card catalogues under Jefferson.

A comprehensive bibliography such as this cites two rather different kinds of item: the first sort ideally is written with a scholarly intention for a scholarly audience and contains an apparatus such as footnotes, references, etc., while the other is aimed at a popular readership which may not have much previous knowledge of Jefferson or his times. Not all material, of course, conforms to one or the other of these polar ends of what is in fact a broad spectrum of writing about Jefferson. Some material prepared for a lay audience, an article in a journal like American Heritage for instance, is based upon careful research but is presented without the usual scholarly apparatus, while books and articles ripe with footnotes are upon occasion derivative or insipid. Dumas Malone's six-volume biography of Jefferson is a landmark of scholarship which has also attracted a wide popular audience.

Scholars will always find useful in some way any well-written, informed and informative statement about Jefferson, regardless of its manner of presentation. But even the derivative, the merely popular, or the trivial item deserves a place in a bibliography claiming comprehensiveness. First, because such material is occasionally cited in scholarly indexes or bibliographies, it needs to be described for what it is and cleared out of scholars' way. Second, such material, as Peterson has shown in The Jefferson Image , claims an interest in its own right; material with little intrinsic scholarly value can still be quite informative about the development of public opinion in reference to both Jefferson himself and his interests. Popular articles on Jefferson, while holding little of interest for a serious Jefferson scholar, can tell us much about things as diverse as America's changing tastes in architecture, national concern for the separation of church and state, the fate of public education, or evolving issues of the Constitution. These popular articles are a barometer of the nation's attention levels. In other words, a comprehensive bibliography such as this records the material of interest to serious Jefferson scholars and directs them away from items unsuitable for their purposes, but it also lists material which is the basis for a kind of sociology of popular knowledge, notes toward understanding of an American mentalite .

Criteria for Inclusion

I have attempted to list every article, dissertation, and book dealing with Thomas Jefferson in a substantial way which has appeared since his death in 1826 and through 1980. I have also attempted to cite books containing at least one chapter specifically on Jefferson (or a section of approximately chapter length). Within these parameters I used the following criteria to determine which items to include in this bibliography:

• (1) Previous listing in some index, bibliography, or library card catalogue under "Thomas Jefferson."
  
  
• (2) Previous listing under "Monticello" or "Declaration of Independence." Items listed under "Monticello" almost always turned out to deal in some way with Jefferson's life there, but, curiously enough, items on the Declaration of Independence would upon occasion completely ignore its Jeffersonian origins and thus not qualify for inclusion in this listing. This cold shoulder to Jefferson came usually where the author was politically conservative and wished to rescue the Declaration from its radical draftsman. After checking references to other writings of Jefferson such as Notes on the State of Virginia , I determined they were typically cross-referenced under his name and that only "Monticello" and "Declaration of Independence" were useful additional references to trace.
  
  
• (3) All works with the word "Jeffersonian" in the title. Here a large number of items were rejected when the term was used as a general chronological label, i.e., for anyone or any event in the years 1790 to 1825, or in some cases as a general political tag when the work turned out to have little direct reference to Jefferson.
  
  
• (4) Works dealing with the period of Jefferson's mature years which might by inference be supposed to contain substantial material directly relevant to him, e.g., histories of the presidency or of foreign affairs and diplomacy. Again, items were rejected when there was no substantial coverage of Jefferson himself, so histories of his presidency which include chapters on his leadership of his party or his role in the Louisiana Purchase were included whereas histories which focus on events independently of him as agent or actor were rejected. I did not include studies of figures like Hamilton or Madison which inevitably contain a great deal of attention, at least in passing, to Jefferson unless there was at least a chapter concerned directly with him. Under this criterion books about minor figures are more likely to qualify for inclusion than those about major figures; Madison is of considerable interest in his own right and is so treated, but Philip Mazzei or William Short are of interest because they were friends of Jefferson, and writers on them focus on this relationship.

Exclusion of works considered under criteria (3) and (4) above required individual acts of judgment, but items qualifying under the first criterion, previous bibliographic listings, were included even when they seemed to be of only peripheral interest. In such cases, however, the annotation should suggest this peripheral quality, since one of the uses of a bibliography such as this is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Similarly, although the bibliography includes items written for a juvenile audience, much of it previously referenced, it clearly identifies such material as juvenile fiction or non-fiction. This bibliography does not ordinarily include encyclopedia or biographical dictionary entries, newspaper publications, or book reviews, although it does cite review essays. (It has also included items from the New York Times Magazine and Christian Science Monitor Magazine because they are listed in the Guide to Periodical Literature .) Although the coverage here is comprehensive for the years 1826 through 1980, a few important items appearing in 1981 or 1982 are represented, the final volume of Malone's biography and Noble Cunningham's The Image of Thomas Jefferson , for instance.

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

One extremely important source is not cited in these pages and should be noted here. Beginning in 1950 under the general editorship of Julian P. Boyd, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson have been appearing from the Princeton University Press. As of 1982, under the editorship of Charles Cullen since Boyd's death, it has arrived at twenty volumes, the most recent covering papers from April through August of 1791; announced for publication is volume 21 which will be a general index for the first twenty volumes. (Separate "throwaway" indexes have been issued for volumes 1-6, 7-12, and 13-18, but the new index should supercede these both in completeness and usefulness.) When complete in sixty volumes, this should be the definitive edition of Jefferson's writings. In addition to his public papers and his letters, it includes letters written to him and extensive scholarly notes and commentary. These notes, many of which swell to the proportions of extended essays, are not listed separately in this bibliography. Anyone writing on Jefferson who deals with any aspect of his life in years covered by the Papers should consult these volumes, both for the Jefferson texts and for the scholarly apparatus. (For those interested, the subject index of this bibliography references items pertaining to the genesis and progress of the Papers edition.)

I should like to thank all those who assisted me in my research. I am grateful to the librarians of all the libraries I noted above as contributing to my researches, and in addition I wish to thank the librarians of Lafayette College and Dickinson College who gave me access to materials in their collection. I am grateful to the librarians of my own University of Rochester Libraries, particularly so to Phyllis Andrews. Julius Barclay, rare book librarian of the University of Virginia, was exceptionally considerate and supportive, and the friendly assistance of Carol Bierly and Amy L. White was much appreciated. James A. Bear, Jr., curator of Monticello, was of more help than I can possibly credit here. He has a truly Jeffersonian desire to encourage scholarship as well as a tough-mindedness, sense of humor, and spirit of hospitality that Mr. Jefferson could not fail to approve. I am also grateful to his staff, William Beiswanger, Elizabeth Braswell, Lucia Goodwin, and Charles Granquist, who answered questions and gave of their time. In my travels from library to library I was materially helped and entertained by David and Patricia Levin, Charlotte Morse, Ray and Claudine Nelson, and Margaret Wells; their generous hospitality gave me more time to fill in lots of file cards. Also helpful were Philip Weimerskirch, James Spenko, and Peter Dzwonkoski, who sent material my way, and Bruce Johnson and J. Paul Hunter, who gave me leave when I needed it. Cindy Warner and Catherine Strassner typed heroically and with good humor. They caught most of my typos; any errors that remain are all mine. Jane Shuffelton put up with my enthusiasm and absences, and Amy and George listened to a lot of stories about "TJ."

University of Rochester May 8, 1983