The thing that is frustrating but fascinating about james madison, he was this incredibly impactful individual over world history, but because he was private and introverted and other aspects he was 54, 100 pounds, have these anxiety attacks he has not exerted the same kind of Gravitational Force field on people that Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton have. That to me was the reason to write a book that plunged deep into his youth and comingofage to figure out, how do we know this guy . What motivated him to have such an impact on the country and the world . James madison was from right here, which is Orange County, the heart of virginia, half an hour north of charlottesville. He grew up in this house behind us, which has changed over the years. They brought it closer to what it was. When he was a young boy, he was primitivea much more fatherment before his built this brick house. Madison was the son of a privileged family. His father was a planter. Gentry. Up in the elite experienceinto the of the world being an older brother. A demanding father. He was the oldest son of a premier family in virginia at the time. He enjoyed all of the benefits, but also the burdens that came with that. He was sent away to an elite boarding school in his early teens, sent outofstate to go to the college of new jersey. He was one of the oldest born and someone his family invested in. It later became princeton. It was not william and mary, which is most which is where most parents sent their kids at the time. It was not an anglican college, it was a presbyterian one. Backather brought him after graduating from college to be a tutor to his youngest siblings here. He did not want to do that. Sort of the cost of being the eldest son, the bearer of. His privilege he came back and was forced by his father to apply that learning an investment in Orange County, when he thought it would be much more exciting to be invalid you. Inultimately to be philadelphia. He ultimately made it back there. One of the battles was what was he was going to do for a living. What he was good at was legislating and understanding problems, researching them, coming up with an approach to crucial Public Policy problems that everybody else could not translate into a solution in politics. That is what he was good at. Because he inherited a plantation, he had a very difficult time settling on a vocation outside of government and Public Service. He had a terrible time becoming a lawyer. In the book i chronicle his difficulties being a successful plantation operator. He had an equally difficult time coming a lawyer. There are these funny passages where he is complaining about how boring and difficult and intense law is. He never managed to do it in the right way. He only got an honorary degree. He would sit in this house in the library battling with these books,s these law vocally very miserable. It was a constant struggle how he was going to make a living. He had a fit of anxious depression when he came back. He had these psychological challenges, which i argue that he had a category of anxiety disorder that caused him to have these attacks where he would basically collects and basically collapse and be out of commission. He came back after college tutoring. A couple of causes took him over. One of them was the harassment baptists in virginia. Sect thiswere a time he needed a licensed to preach, and they didnt do that. Just north of here in a county called culpepper, they were in present and were imprisoned and harassed by the ruling state religion. He was very taken with that cause, religious toleration, what it meant to cast your lot with an underdog. There are some accounts that he traveled and saw what was happening. He took this on as a cause. That was one political itch to use Public Policy to express a conviction and principal and engage in questions of governance and Public Service. He talked about it that way. Soon afterward he became a member from Orange County to the Constitutional Convention this is after the declaration of independence. They needed to come up with a constitution. He became counselor to the governor, Patrick Henry, as a young man. He was in his mid20s. He achieved a position in the official post revolutionary government of virginia in his 20s. That is when he started his career. His conviction on issues ran the gamut of every Public Policy issue that the country was dealing with, especially at this young age. When he was a young aid to governor henry, he became obsessed with the problem of military supplies. This was a difficult question that the time. The state was figuring out how to supply a part federal, part state armed forces that was fighting great britain. How youhe problems was equip and supply the troops when the dollars they are using there were five different kinds of money at the time, and they were all incredibly inflated. It was hard to find the food and drink and supplies the army needed. He carried that through to congress. For instance, when he came back to virginia as a delegate, he got fascinated by the problem of overhauling virginias state code so it didnt have these medieval punishments, like Capital Punishment for random things, for that there was not or that there was not a lieutenant governor. He overhauled virginia law. Those are much less sexy than what he did that became very famous, like the separation of powers in our government, bicameral legislature. He was instrumental in shaping the federal judiciary, and independently appointed very statesmanlike judiciary. There were all those issues that he contributed to in the design of the country. There were dozens of others that he also mastered. Book, the grains of the the thing that planted the seed was this discovery i made looking through the minutes of the ratifying convention in richmond in 1788. The year after the Constitutional Convention in philadelphia. Madison and his former boss, this major figure in virginia politics, Patrick Henry they faced off against each other for three weeks. Madison was the leader of the federalists. Madison at the time had two anxiety attacks that caused him to be removed. He had to go stay in his boardinghouse for days at a time. I think it is because he experienced an incredibly heunting and difficult, t pressure of having the whole country on his narrow 54 shoulders. Most of the time when he engaged in real intense public battle about something, it was not easy for him because he was an introvert. It doesnt come naturally to be the leader of a nation. I think his leadership came from has, and hist he understanding that he needed to solve things through Public Service and Public Policy. It was a necessity. He mastered it by will and charisma, his unlikely relationships, his warmth and conviction and passion, but it was always a more tortured overcoming obstacles for him than someone who had a grace and ease about being in public. George washington would be the classic example, someone at ease being leader of a people. There was a charisma in that. That is not what madisons experience was like i dont. He is the least likely person to get involved in politics you could possibly have thought of. His whoful friend of ran the boardinghouse he stayed at in philadelphia. Onetime jobless jefferson sent Thomas Jefferson said, he should run for governor of virginia. She said she called it the torrent of abuses he would experience in public life he was too sensitive. His closest friends said politics was the last thing he should do. The fact that he did it anyway, because he felt the need to address these problems. Even if it was him, he said its got to be somebody. It was his conviction that powered him through. They knew what he was talking about, they cared what he was talking about, and had figured out an answer that was probably better than what the rest of them had done. He was throwing himself into the ring to figure out the solution. Came out of the chain of succession. When he shifted into the executive, becoming president of the united states, the deficiencies he had were more on display. It was harder for him to give confidence to the nation during the war of 1812. He was criticized for that. Decisionshis staffing , his cabinet members and prosecuting the war, the images he presented to the country did not meet the moment. That is one of the reasons his image suffered over the decades. He very much at the moment when the country needed met the moment when the country needed to craft the cover rises the compromises that would create the different the whole machine that would guide the country. One of the initial pieces of research was looking at the address of memoirs drafts of memoirs. He kept writing a short autobiography, maybe 20 pages. Hisocused almost all of retrospective on his events until age 37. He paid barely any attention to when he was president or secretary of state. He saw his lifes work as having been writing and enacting the constitution, and not so much conducting wars of the country as chief executive. In the Constitutional Convention in the 1820s, madison is in his he has beenen secretary of state, father of the constitution, and he takes on popular difficult likeular difficult causes, giving africanamericans the right of representation in the counting of population for districts. Hingpeople husin drawing around him so they could hear what he is saying is totally different than Daniel Webster standing in front of people, being blown away from this powerful oratory. It was his quietness and his element of being magnetically pulled to that conviction, and the fact that he knew what he was talking about, that i think explains why people were so drawn to him. I dont think history gives credit to james madison. I wrote the book about statesmanship. You see it in the way he talks about the federal judiciary, the u. S. Senate, regular citizens. There are they are supposed to be challenging public opinion. There are supposed to be alliances and compromises and debates. All of this goes pushing toward a higher plane, not just going to the lowest common denominator. We would not be here but for his statesmanship at any number of crucial junctures, whether it was freedom of religion or getting the constitution itself passed. The fact that we dont rank about it much today is the problem. Think about it much today is the problem. We are in the main gallery of the special Collections Library at the university of virginia. Is current exhibition falconer, life and works, surveying the magnificent William Faulkner collections we have at the library. William faulkner was a Great American novelist born in mississippi, and spent the last few years of his career in the late 1950s and early 1960s at uva. He is best known for his novels the sound and the fury, as i absalom, absalom, and he was a poet and short story writer. Although we often bring individual items out, we have not told the full William Faulkner story and given the Public Access to a huge range of material for quite some time. It is the 60th anniversary of his arrival at the university as writer in residence. We still have people coming to visit tell us about having met William Faulkner while they were here. While William Faulkner was at uva, he was working on his own writing. He spent a lot of time in formal and informal events, meeting with students, faculty, community members, female students from local or nearby womens colleges, since uva was only men at the time, and other groups to talk about his novels, the state of literature today, and much anything else they asked him about. He enjoyed living in virginia. He had always had a dream to learn to fox hunt. He learned while he was here and joined the farmington hunt and would go foxhunting on the weekends whenever he possibly could. We have a lot of wonderful artifacts from William Faulkners time at uva. Among other things we have the typewriter he was issued by the university. We have a jacket that he wore. When you look at the jacket, it is pretty torn up and ratt. He likes to keep his clothing for a long time. He hung up his jacket when he went on his last trip to oxford, mississippi when he passed away. In the pocket of the jacket was a pipe and type cleaners. Pipe cleaners. We put those on display. It collections are so vast, was difficult to decide how to tell the story of William Faulkners lifetime. We looked at the various personae constructed by William Faulkner actively or the circumstances he found himself in throughout his life. There are 13 different aspects of his personality displayed. We tried to cover the personal, professional, and lesserknown. For instance, i dont think many know that William Faulkner was a wonderful artist and drew all throughout his life. A lot of people dont know he did interesting work after he won the nobel as a literary ambassador working for the u. S. State department. We tried to pull the unexpected stories and show the most iconic collections. The materials that demonstrate William Faulkners Family History are also on display. One i find interesting and poignant, that we placed front and center, islam before William Faulkner was born. Is long before William Faulkner was born. It is a receipt for a slave by William Faulkners grandfather. We wanted to point out how important that history was. The issue of slavery and Race Relations in the south. These are central to his work and are revered as topics covered with brilliance and care throughout his work. We wanted to make sure that we put that interesting artifact on display as a symbol of his problem that he inherited. One of the most interesting episodes of William Faulkners life is when he spent time in hollywood as a screen writer. He didnt particularly like his time in hollywood. Took writing screenplays for the studios to make money. He had a hard time making ends meet because writing was difficult. Books were not selling as well as if they were more readable. He needed to find other ways to support his family. Screenwriting worked for him for a long time. He worked for a couple decades. The items on display are wonderful. My favorite is a fragment of his screenplay for the film the big sleep, which is considered a masterpiece for its time. In one of his essays from the 1950s, he refers to himself as having the position of a white southerner. He said, what is this white southerner figure that faulkner inhabits . Himself very much as ining a challenging position relation to the African Community among oxford. Many featured throughout his fictional works. An exhibition called white southerner looks at how faulkner grappled with questions of racial identity in the south in the 1950s. He wins the nobel prize in the 1950s. From that point on, his fame explodes. His books are sold in massive quantities. He becomes a household name. At the same time the Civil Rights Movement is starting to gather steam and the debates over integration become more vocal and more polarizing in the united states. Faulkner begin to be called upon as a public figure to comment upon integration. Abroad in asked foreign countries, as a southern american, tell us what you think about these issues. We have a lot of documents that show faulkner trying hard to figure out how to do determine his own position on integration. These documents show that faulkner found himself stuck between different positions. On the one hand, his view that integration needed to happen put him at odds with a lot of whites in mississippi. However he often called for a slow gradualist move toward integration, which put him at odds with northerners. He felt that he had a loyalty to the south. He did not want the north to tell the south what to do. He is constantly shifting his perspective overtime. His perspective is really unusual and interesting. I found that visitors to the exhibition find a lot to think about. We want all audiences to enjoy this exhibition. You canre a faulkner, commune with his manuscripts. If you had some trauma with faulkner in high school, we want you to understand his biography. We want people to come away with a sense of faulkner as an entire the aspects of his story. So much of his time was spent struggling to make money. It is remarkable to see what he accomplished. We want people to get a sense of the full range of material that can be in a literary archive. It is a real treasure. We are so happy to share it. [applause] the 2011 National Matter of arts for her country since two american letters and service as poet laureate from 1993 to 1995. Hethrough her works, she has eliminated poetry illuminated poetry and literature. Theetting that medal, National Medal of the arts, meant personally something. It was an achievement, one that i felt humbled to receive. Meant that the arts mattered. And to have the arts recognized f government was a profound act, not just for me, but for every young person in this country who ever wanted to express themselves, whether it in paint or words or song dance. It meant all of those things. I wrote as a hobby. I did not know it could be a profession. I had had no role models. I never met a novelist or a poet. All of these people who wrote these things work names in a book. Things were names in a book. Me it was something i did as a hobby. I really thought i would be was to be all, one doctor or lawyer or teacher. I dont think my parents ever pressured me. I did not