The New York Times bestseller from master biographer Evan Thomas brings to life the tumultuous story of the father of the American Navy. John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to history what Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless, indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, “in harm’s way.” Evan Thomas’s minute-by-minute re-creation of the bloodbath between Jones’s Bonhomme Richard and the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea battle as can be found in any novel. Drawing on Jones’s correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the American Revolution—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—Thomas’s biography teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones’s spirit was classically American.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Paul Jones" by Hutchins Hapgood. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

John Paul Jones (born John Paul; July 6, 1747 – July 18, 1792) was the United States' first well known naval commander in the American Revolutionary War, and yet the details of his extraordinary career are little known. His fame, in the broad sense of enduring interest, ranks with that of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, A dams, and Robert Morris; and, in his own particular province, he stands absolutely alone. To the average student of American history, mention of our Revolutionary Navy instantly suggests the name of Paul Jones, and no other. Yet, notwithstanding such singular distinction as a generality, but little is correctly known in detail as to the actual life and the real character of the man. The daily lives, the individual incidents, and the personal characters of our other very great men in that epoch are as open books. These men spent their lives in our country, and after they had passed away the materials for their histories were left in friendly hands. The reverse was true of Paul Jones. This is one of the rare books written about the life and achievements of this historical figure.