Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of more than forty books, including New York Times bestsellers Reagan's America (1987), Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), Papal Sin (2000), What Jesus Meant (2006), and Why Priests? (2013). A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Wills is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University. He is a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the National Humanities Medal in 1998. Wills lives in Evanston, Illinois.

• Cover Page
• Praise for Garry Wills
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface, 2017
• Introduction to the 2002 Mariner Edition
• Preface
• I. The Moral Market (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
  • 1. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
  • 2. The Center Cannot Hold
  • 3. The Politics of Resentment
  • 4. The Denigrative Method
  • 5. Checkers
  • 6. The Hero
  • 7. The Common Man
  • 8. Whittier: First Day
  • 9. Whittier: Second Day
• II. The Economic Market (Adam Smith)
  • 1. Miami, 1968
  • 2. Political Philanthropy
  • 3. Republican Camelot
  • 4. They, the People
  • 5. The Goldwater Party
  • 6. Southern Strategy
  • 7. The Succeeder
  • 8. The Non-Succeeders
  • 9. Making It
• III. The Intellectual Market (John Stuart Mill)
  • 1. Chicago, 1968
  • 2. Liberals
  • 3. Radicals
  • 4. The Establishment
  • 5. The War on War
  • 6. Plastic Man
• IV. The Political Market (Woodrow Wilson)
  • 1. "Self-Determination"
  • 2. A Good Election
  • 3. The Covenant
  • 4. Universalism
  • 5. Our Country!
• V. The Future of Liberalism
  • 1. Saving the System
  • 2. Refiguring the Calculus
  • 3. "Left" and "Right" in America
  • 4. "Beyond Left and Right"
  • 5. Nixon Triumphans: The Self-Made Man
  • 6. Nixon Agonistes: The Last Liberal?
• Index to Proper Names
• About the Author
• Copyright Page

With a new preface: A "stunning" analysis of the troubled Republican president by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg (The New York Times Book Review).
In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often "very amusing" look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews).

Arguing that Nixon was a reflection of the country that elected him, Wills examines not only the psychology of the man himself and his relationships with others-from his wife, Pat, to his vice-president, Spiro Agnew-but also the state of the nation at the time, mired in the Vietnam War and experiencing a cultural rift that pitted the young against the old. Putting his findings into moral, economic, intellectual, and political contexts, he ultimately "paints a broad and provocative landscape of the nation's-and Nixon's-travails" (The New York Times).

Simultaneously compassionate and critical, and raising interesting perspectives on the shifting definitions of terms like "conservative" and "liberal" over recent decades, Nixon Agonistes is a brilliant and indispensable book from one of America's most acclaimed historians.