Jon Meacham Books in Order

If you want the classic presidential biographies: American Lion → Thomas Jefferson → And There Was Light
If you want twentieth-century leadership: Franklin and Winston → Destiny and Power → The Call to Serve
If you want democracy and civic life: The Soul of America → In the Hands of the People → American Struggle
If you want civil rights history: Voices in Our Blood → His Truth Is Marching On
If you want faith in American life: American Gospel → The Hope of Glory

Jon Meacham was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1969 and grew up there with history very close at hand. He was educated at St. Nicholas School and the McCallie School, then went on to Sewanee, the University of the South, where he studied English literature and graduated in 1991. He has often described Chattanooga as a place where the American past felt concrete, especially because he grew up near Civil War ground on Missionary Ridge.

For him, history was never just a classroom subject.

That early feel for story and setting helps explain why he came to books through journalism. After college he started at The Chattanooga Times, then moved to Washington and into magazine work. At Newsweek he rose through the ranks to become editor-in-chief in 2006, and later served as an executive editor and executive vice president at Random House. Those years gave him the habits that still shape his writing: close reporting, a sharp eye for personality, and a sense that public events are usually driven by private motives as much as big ideas.

His early books already showed the range of his interests. Voices in Our Blood gathered important writing on the civil rights movement. Franklin and Winston traced the friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II. American Gospel took up another long-running American argument, the relationship between faith, politics, and religious liberty.

Then he turned fully to presidents.

In American Lion, Meacham looked at Andrew Jackson in the White House, focusing not only on policy and elections but also on temperament, loyalty, grief, and the rough human drama around power. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2009 and helped make him one of the best-known presidential biographers writing today. What readers often like about Meacham is that he does not treat leaders as marble statues. He keeps them human, sometimes impressive, sometimes difficult, often both at once.

He followed American Lion with Thomas Jefferson, a study of Jefferson as a practical politician as much as a thinker. In Destiny and Power, he drew on George H. W. Bush's diaries and family papers to write a close portrait of a reserved man moving through war, diplomacy, and the presidency. Then, in And There Was Light, he took on Abraham Lincoln, tracing Lincoln's moral and political growth through slavery, secession, civil war, and the strain of holding a democracy together. Across these books, Meacham returns again and again to leadership under pressure.

That same concern runs through his other work. The Soul of America looks back at earlier periods of division and asks how the country has pulled back from fear before. His Truth Is Marching On follows John Lewis from an Alabama childhood to the center of the civil rights movement and Congress. Books like Songs of America, written with Tim McGraw, and In the Hands of the People broaden the picture, showing Meacham's interest in citizenship, protest, faith, memory, and the stories Americans tell about themselves.

He likes big subjects, but he usually approaches them through people.

Today Meacham holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair at Vanderbilt University, where he is a distinguished visiting professor and co-chairs the Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. He is also Canon Historian of Washington National Cathedral and a contributing editor at Time. He lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.