Neal Gabler & David S. Brown: A Conversation

David S. Brown is the author of several books, including The Last American Aristocrat, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Brown’s timely The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson (Scribner) positions the seventh U.S. president firmly in the forefront of the country’s populist tradition. Jackson rose from rural poverty to become the dominant figure in American politics between Jefferson and Lincoln. His reputation, however, defies easy description. A self-defined champion of “farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” Jackson railed against the established ruling order – fostering a brand of democracy that struck a chord with the common man – while also taking a prominent role in removing Native American peoples from their ancestral lands. Brown examines Jackson’s public career, including the momentous Battle of New Orleans, the far-reaching Bank War, Jackson’s marriage to an already married woman, and his deadly duel with a Nashville dandy, and analyzes his magnetic hold on much of the country at the time. The First Populist connects Jackson and his legacy to a history of division, dissent, and partisanship that has come to define our current times.

Neal Gabler is the author of six previous books, including four biographies: Catching the Wind, An Empire of Their Own, Winchell, and Walt Disney. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Shorenstein fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholarship, and was the chief nonfiction judge of the National Book Awards. Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976 – 2009 (Crown) completes Gabler’s magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. It traces Kennedy’s life from the wilderness of the Reagan years through the compromises of the Clinton era, from his rage against the craven cruelty of George W. Bush to his hope that Obama would deliver universal health care. Almost by default, he became the most powerful voice legislating for the neglected or punished: the poor, the working class, and African Americans. But time and again, Kennedy’s moral failures were used to weaken his voice and undercut his claims to political morality. Against the Wind sheds new light on a revered figure of American politics and on the country’s current existential crisis.