Man of the People

Harry S. Truman is remembered today as an icon of the plain-speaking president, `Give 'em Hell Harry', the chief executive who put `The Buck Stops Here' on his desk. But Alonzo L Hamby shows that there was more to Truman than the pugnacious fighter so prominent in popular memory. Insecure, ambitious, a man of honour, a partisan loyalist, an agrarian Jeffersonian Democrat who became a champion of big government, Truman was a complex figure who fought long and hard to triumph over his own weaknesses.

In Man of the People, Hamby offers a gripping account of this distinctly American life, tracing Truman's remarkable rise from marginal farmer in rural Missouri to shaper of the postwar world. Throughout, Truman is shown to be emblematic of American democracy during the first half of the twentieth century.