Washington

It took Ron Chernow six years, the first four spent on research alone, to write his one-volume biography of George Washington. A former business journalist, he conceived it while researching his life of Alexander Hamilton, and he drew heavily on archival records from the Papers of George Washington project. Chernow sets out to replace the image of a stolid, unemotional figure with a passionate man of many moods and strong opinions held in check by immense self-control. The narrative runs in largely chronological order through the French and Indian War, command of the Continental Army, the Constitutional Convention and two terms as first president. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Barack Obama put it on his 2015 list of summer favorites, and Ryan Holiday counted it among the big biographies he read in 2014 that were worth every page.