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The
George Washington Book Prize award ceremony,
Mount Vernon,
May 23, 2006.
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MOUNT VERNON, Va. – The second annual George
Washington Book Prize was awarded at Mount Vernon on
May 23 to Stacy Schiff for her book, A Great Improvisation:
Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. The
$50,000 prize honors the most important new book about
the founding era. Schiff, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer
Prize for biography, tells the story of the eight years
Benjamin Franklin spent in France beginning in 1776.
“In this time of renewed interest in the founding
period, it is especially gratifying to be recognized
for my efforts to bring a little-known chapter of Ben
Franklin’s life to light,” said Schiff.
“To receive this significant award at the home
of another illustrious founder is a true honor.”
Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, the Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City,
and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association collaborated
in 2005 to create the prize, awarded in
its inaugural year to Ron Chernow for Alexander
Hamilton.
Presented to Schiff at a black-tie event featuring
cuisine inspired by recipes found in Franklin’s
papers, the George Washington Book Prize is one of the
most generous book awards in the United States. Its
$50,000 is a far greater sum than that of literary awards
such as the Pulitzer Prize for History ($7,500) and
the National Book Award ($10,000).
In A Great Improvisation, Schiff draws from
new and not widely known sources to illuminate the least-explored
part of Franklin’s life. She brings to the surface
an unfamiliar chapter of the Revolution, a tale of American
infighting, and the backroom dealings at Versailles
that would propel George Washington from near decimation
at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. A particularly
human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father emerges
as readers get a sense of how fragile, improvisational,
and international was our country’s bid for independence.
“In sparkling prose, burnished to a high gloss,
Stacy Schiff tells the tale of Benjamin Franklin in
Paris with piquant humor, outrageous anecdotes worthy
of the finest French farce, and a wealth of lapidary
observations…C’est magnifique,” said
last year’s prize winner Chernow.
The event at Mount Vernon, complete with fireworks
and candlelit tours of Washington’s Mansion, also
celebrated the works of the two other finalists before
an audience of guests from political, academic, and
diplomatic arenas. Finalists were Edward Lengel for
General George Washington: A Military Life
and Stanley Weintraub for Iron Tears: America’s
Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783.
The books were selected by a three-person jury of early-American
history scholars: Carol Berkin of Baruch College, City
University of New York; Walter Isaacson of the Aspen
Institute; and Gordon Wood of Brown University.
“In each work selected, the jury saw refreshing
perspectives on our nation’s founding era,”
said Ted Widmer, director of Washington College’s
C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience,
which administers the prize.
“This prize is a tremendous way to recognize
exceptional scholarship on perhaps the greatest period
in American history,” said James Basker, President
of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
About the Institutions
Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution
of higher learning established in the new republic.
George Washington was not only a principal donor to
the college, he also served on the governing board for
many years. He received an honorary degree from the
college in June 1789, two months after assuming the
presidency. The George Washington Book Prize is administered
by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study
of the American Experience, an innovative center for
the study of history, culture and politics.
Founded in 1994 by Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman,
the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes
the study and love of American history. Increasingly
national and international in scope, the Institute targets
audiences ranging from students to scholars to the general
public. It creates history-centered schools and academic
research centers, organizes seminars and enrichment
programs for educators, partners with school districts
to implement Teaching American History grants, produces
print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions,
and sponsors lectures by historians. The Institute also
funds the Lincoln Prize and Frederick Douglass Book
Prize and offers fellowships for scholars to work in
history archives, including the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
With the completion of the Donald W. Reynolds Museum
and Education Center scheduled for October 27, 2006,
the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has pledged
to create the equivalent of a presidential library for
George Washington. The Association will work with scholars
at the University of Virginia Press to place all of
Washington’s writings on Mount Vernon’s
award-winning website. “We want to be the first
place people think of when they have a question about
George Washington,” noted James Rees, Mount Vernon’s
Executive Director. “The George Washington Book
Prize is an important component in our aggressive outreach
program to historians, teachers, and students.”
About Stacy Schiff
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra,
which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and
Saint-Exupéry, a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer
Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities,
and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for
Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Schiff lives with her husband and three children in
New York City.
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