Saint Augustine
Garry Wills, signed by author
$20.00

“Garry Wills is an American historian, journalist, and author of provocative books on Roman Catholicism, history, and politics. Wills taught classics and humanities at Johns Hopkins University beginning in 1962 and continued to publish, with his first book on Catholicism, Politics and Catholic Freedom, appearing in 1964. Wills’ experience covering seminal civil rights and Vietnam War protest events for Esquire throughout the 1960s, including the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped to steer Wills’ conservative politics on these issues in a more liberal direction, and he parted ways with the National Review. In his first book on a U.S. president, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), Wills proposed that Richard Nixon was a liberal, contrary to the Republican president’s public image and analyzed the troubled relationship between the president and the country. Many critics saw the book as a criticism not only of Nixon but of the United States itself. Wills continued to publish on Catholic thought, including Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (1972), and won several awards, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award, for his controversial reconsideration of the basis for Thomas Jefferson’s political thought, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978). He received a Peabody Award for writing and directing the PBS Frontline documentary The Choice, an in-depth look at the 1988 presidential campaign, and a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), a study of the enduring power and influence of Abraham Lincoln’s prose.”-Britannica.