Fred Kaplan

The award-winning biographer offers a new look the life of Thomas Jefferson, focusing on his genius with language and how be both inspired and helped shape a new nation.

"A fine, invaluable book. . . . Certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. . . . Kaplan meticulously analyzes how Lincoln's steadily maturing prose style enabled him to come to grips with slavery and, as his own views evolved, to express his deepening opposition to it." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World For Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered....

The engaging biography of one of the most celebrated and enduring authors of Western literature Charles Dickens grew up in harsh poverty and became one of the world's most beloved authors. Biographer Fred Kaplan takes a brilliant, multifaceted approach in his examination of Dickens's life: his fraught marriage and relationships; the ever-present effects of his humble beginnings; his extensive, but carefully managed, public life; and his friendships...

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning portrait of the Victorian writer and historian Thomas Carlyle A Pulitzer finalist that draws upon years of research and unpublished letters, Thomas Carlyle examines the life of the Victorian genius. Carlyle was the author of Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution: A History, and he possessed one of literature's most flamboyant prose styles. Despite a childhood beset by anxiety and illness, Carlyle...

"As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers displace terrorists on the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the "information...