Scandalmonger

The year is 1797. Meet James Thomson Callender, a radical newspaper editor secretly on the payroll of presidential hopeful Thomas Jefferson. As a political opposition forms in our fledgling republic, Callender is hard at work starting an equally rich American tradition: muckraking journalism. His sensational exposs of the private lives of public men will come to alter the course of history and may cost him his life. In a gripping and timely work of historical fiction, William Safire unveils the story behind the nation's first great political scandals.