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.

Presents the life and career of John Paul Jones, a naval hero of the American Revolution, who is considered called the father of the American navy.

Traces the early life of the Scottish sea captain who became a hero in the American Revolution and founded the U.S. Navy.

Illustrated by period artwork and photographs of historical artifacts, a biography of John Paul Jones describes how the Scots immigrant served in the Continental Navy during the American Revolution and led his men to victory over the world's greatest sea power.

Profiles John Paul Jones, who served during the Revolutionary War and is credited with founding the United States Navy.