Jon was the editor for Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement that was released in 2001. Spanning the period from 1941 to 1998, the book involves writings of noted civil-rights leaders, novelists, and journalists, like John Lewis, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, and David Halberstam. Jon’s book, Franklin and Winston, Partners of an Intimate Relationship about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, was released in 2003.
He has explored America’s leaders in such services as Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and his biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Writing in a book review in The New York Times Jill Abramson states that Jon’s books are “well researched, drawing on new anecdotal material and up-to-date historiographical interpretations” and presents his “subjects as figures of valiant grandeur despite all-too-human shortcomings”.
In his biography of Jefferson, Jon identifies qualities that would be helpful in the new political arena, “Jefferson repeatedly reached out to his enemies and showed ideological flexibility.” According to the former president’s stance on slavery, Jon states, “Slavery was the rare subject where Jefferson’s sense of realism kept him from marshaling his sense of hope in the service of the cause of reform.”
