Book Alert / My Dearest Friend

My Dearest Friend -- Letters of Abigail and John Adams, Edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor, Belknap/Harvard '07, $35, 508 pages, ISBN #0-674-02606-3. Index, chronology, gorgeous, full-color spread of glossy images.

David McCullough's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams brought to light for the first time hundreds of letters between Adams and his wife Abigail, fleshing out her intelligence, perspicacity, and character in a way never done before. During the course of their long lives, the Adamses exchanged more than 1,000 letters, now housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Collectively, they have now become the subject of a new historical work, edited by two editors of the Society's Adams Papers, that is also a love story.

This chronological rendering of the Adams's lives begins with John's flirtatious letter to 17 year old "Miss Adorable," Abigail Smith. In a day before telephone and e-mail, letters, each beginning, "My Dearest Friend," were their prime link to one another, so it's possible to tell when they spent time together by the absence of missives. During Adams's career in Washington and overseas, Abigail lived an active life at home in Massachusetts. Her letters to him then not only addressed the personal and familial but talked of affairs of state as well. In a different era, Abigail clearly could have been a Hilllary Clinton.