James Thomas Flexner

James Thomas Flexner, award-winning biographer of George Washington and an eclectic author whose subjects ranged from steamboats and spies to American art, has died. He was 95.

Flexner, whose four-volume work on the nation's first president was turned into two television miniseries starring Barry Bostwick as Washington, died Thursday in his New York City apartment of natural causes.

The Washington work, with original volumes first published in 1965, 1968, 1970 and 1972 and reissued in 1982 on the eve of the founding president's 250th birthday, earned Flexner the National Book Award and a special Pulitzer citation. The volumes included "George Washington: The Forge of Experience," "George Washington in the American Revolution," "George Washington and the New Nation" and "George Washington: Anguish and Farewell."

Flexner also wrote a one-volume abridgment, "Washington: the Indispensable Man," published in 1974.

Robert Kirsch, former Los Angeles Times book editor who described the four-volume study as "brilliant and meticulous," called the 1974 volume "the most convincing evocation of the man and his deeds written within the compass of one book."

Kirsch and other critics particularly praised Flexner for adhering to a careful middle course between what Flexner called the "goody-goody" image of Washington as a marble statue and unflattering portraits that tried to pulverize that idol.

When the first volume of the Washington work appeared, historian and critic Pierre Fourrier, in reviewing it for the Times, wrote: "In this, as in most of his works, Dr. Flexner appears to be giving a tactful lesson in writing to other historians. His prose is translucent. It allows the light of the facts to shine through without obscuring the narrative. Yet his research is scrupulous; his theories are invariably supported by common sense. His tone is bright. In a word, Dr. Flexner has style."

Britain's Economist noted that Flexner with the Washington series had set a high standard of "literary elegance, psychological penetration and historical scholarship."

Although Flexner accomplished his goal most appreciably by humanizing Washington, he steadfastly sought from his first book, the 1937 "Doctors on Horseback: Pioneers of American Medicine" about his father among others, through his 26th and final book, his autobiography "Maverick's Progress" in 1996, to personalize history and to document historic personalities.

The son of Dr. Simon Flexner, who found a cure for spinal meningitis, and of educator Helen Thomas, Flexner saw himself as a writer from his childhood, despite a struggle with dyslexia that delayed his learning to read and write. Overcoming the problem - in a flash of insight as he sat in Central Park trying to read a story by Beatrix Potter - he went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard.

After a couple of years as a reporter for the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune, Flexner utilized family connections to spend time in Europe acquainting himself with art, which would inform his histories of 18th and 19th century American painting and artists.

Flexner hoped to write novels, but finally settled into writing about history and the people who made it.

In Kirsch's review of the 1959 "Lord of the Mohawks: A Biography of Sir William Johnson," Flexner's book was called "a work that has all the elements of a superior historical novel."

Widowed since 1998, Flexner is survived by his daughter, Helen, of Berkshire, England.

- Los Angeles Times