7 biography george volume washington post

Richard Harwell’s abridgment of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 7-volume series on George Washington was published in 1968, fifteen years after Freeman’s death and eleven years after the series was completed by two of Freeman’s associates.

Harwell was a librarian and historian who also abridged Freeman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 4-volume series on Robert E. Lee. Harwell died in 1988 at the age of 72.

Freeman’s original series on Washington was published between 1948 and 1957.

Comprising seven volumes and about 3,600 pages, this is the most ambitious study of Washington that has been undertaken and compares to Dumas Malone’s series on Thomas Jefferson (1948-1981), Ray Stannard Baker’s series on Woodrow Wilson (1927-1939) and Robert Caro’s ongoing series of Lyndon Johnson (1982-).

Given the length of Freeman’s series and the difficulty in obtaining each