John Wilkes

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: A biography of the wildly colorful eighteenth-century British politician who became “the toast of American revolutionaries” ( Booklist ). One of the most colorful figures in English political history, John Wilkes (1726–97) is remembered as the father of the British free press, a defender of civil and political liberties—and a hero to American colonists. Wilkes’s political career was rancorous, involving duels, imprisonments in the Tower of London, and the Massacre of St.