New York Times journalist Jesse Wegman talks about his book 'The Lost Founder', which revisits the life of Founding Father James Wilson.
Jesse Wegman will be at the Parkway Central Library on Wednesday, November 4, to talk about his book The Lost Founder. It's part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Author Events series, which the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation curates.
If you've never heard of James Wilson, you're in good company—he's one of the Founding Fathers whose name mostly disappeared from the history books. Wegman spends the book bringing him back. As a young lawyer, Wilson wrote an essay on American independence that inspired the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." He penned the first draft of the Constitution and, alongside James Madison, played a central role in getting it finished. He argued for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, was appointed to the first Supreme Court, and then lost it all to reckless land speculation. He died of malaria in a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.
Wegman knows his way around the intersection of law and politics. He's a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and spent 2013 to 2025 on the New York Times editorial board. This is his second book; his first, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, came out in 2020. The Lost Founder is a different kind of project—a biography of a man who helped build the American system and then got crushed by it.
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The talk is at 7 PM at the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway. Tickets are $5.
