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How To Pursue Happiness, According to America’s Founders

For the Founders, to be happy, to attain happiness, was the result of practicing virtue as laid out by the classical writers. In other words, the individual strove to be good, not feel good.

Via Wikimedia Commons
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1801, detail. Via Wikimedia Commons
CARL ROLLYSON
CARL ROLLYSON

‘The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America’
By Jeffrey Rosen
Simon & Schuster, 368 Pages

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CARL ROLLYSON
CARL ROLLYSON

Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. He has published fourteen biographies and has written about biography for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington, Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Criterion, and other publications.

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