IRVING STONE is the acknowledged master of the biographical novel (LUST FOR LIFE, IMMORTAL WIFE, THE PRESIDENT’S LADY, LOVE IS ETERNAL). For his most recent work, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY, Mr. Stone was made a Commendatore e Cavaliere, Knight Commander of the Republic of Italy. He was also presented with
the Giglia d’Oro, the golden lily of Florence, for «distinguished service
to our Renaissance city.» In June, 1965, Mr. Stone was awarded
an honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of Southern California, where he took his Masters degree.

Against the magnificent panorama of our country’s struggle for independence and her first painful steps towards a working republic, a consummate master of the biographical novel unfolds the warm and deeply moving love story of two of America’s most exciting people: Abigail Smith and John Adams.

Abigail was seventeen, the comely daughter of the Reverend Mr. Smith of Weymouth, Massachusetts, when her sister called upstairs that the young lawyer from Braintree had come to visit. She danced down the stairs and surprised John Adams in her father’s library, holding two volumes opened wide. Startled, he turned and held out both arms to her, a book in each hand-and her life began.
It was a hard life in the beginning. John was a circuit lawyer, and lawyers were held in questionable repute; their fees were low, if paid at all. He rode the length and breadth of New England to make a living for his growing family; his absences-bridged only by their sustaining letters and their enduring love-became a poignant pattern in their lives. Yet John’s dream was Abigail’s; she encouraged him when he faltered, tempered his zeal, offered him comfort and shelter when he needed it most.

Through Irving Stone’s ability to bring an age vividly to life and give it contemporary vitality, the trials and the triumphs of Abigail and John become the reader’s own. From the top of Penn’s Hill, overlooking their green farmlands, to the riots and massacres of Boston in violent upheaval, to the colorful and extravagant courts of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles and St. James’s in London, to the tumultuous seats of government in New York and Philadelphia, and finally in the half-completed President’s House in Washington City, we share in Abigail and John’s intimate and compelling love story.
To look back and recollect the adventures of myself and my wife and daughter and sons, I see a kind of romance which, a little embellished with fiction, or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry, wrote John Adams to Abigail.
Abigail answered in the fullness of her talent, her wit, and her devotion.
Life is for those who love.
THOSE WHO LOVE is a novel of affirmation, or «Yea Saying» to man’s richest dreams and aspirations, his sometime failure and ultimate triumph. The story tells not only the depth of love and heroic sacrifice between a man and a woman, but the equally majestic love of men and women for the vision of freedom. It would take sheer genius to drive out of the British Empire the fanatically loyal Englishmen in the Colonies. The British Crown possessed that genius. An even greater genius was needed by the Americans to realize that they must sever their bonds with their Motherland, no matter how painful the process. The Franklins, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, and John Adams, called «The Atlas of the Revolution,» had that genius.
Abigail and John Adams were at the core of this glorious crisis in man’s fate.