I first became interested in Thomas Jefferson as a writer when I took a Seminar on Early American Literature during graduate school at Penn State.  Since my specialty was rhetoric and composition, I began to study some of the unanswered questions about the ways in which Jefferson put his arguments together, especially in his very controversial book, Notes on the State of Virginia.

The dissertation that grew out of these interests is presented here because it served as the basis for much of my later work on Jefferson.