This bold new study of the character of Meriwether Lewis attempts to make sense of one of the most fascinating and perplexing heroes of American history. Clay Jenkinson's Lewis is not a cheerful explorer in buckskins, but a complex, tightly-wound, ambitious and self-conscious man who led one of the great adventures in American history, but had severe re-entry problems and never wrote the book that would have served as the capstone of his explorations.