What's new...

Norm is completing a historical novel titled Sally: Mistress of Monticello, an episodic account of the relationship between the widower Thomas Jefferson and his beautiful slave, Sally Hemings.

Each chapter, marked by a date and place, contains reference to a verifiable event. Jefferson left records of his whereabouts and associations nearly every day of his adult life—a life of achievement accompanied by frequent turbulence and loss. As author of the nonfiction Diagnosing Jefferson, Norm was able to compose dialogue and reasoned narrative based on his knowledge of Jefferson’s complex personality and day-to-day activities.

Sally, half-sister to Thomas’s late wife, is elevated from others’ portrayals as a passive and brooding victim to a self-educated, lively, and often assertive person. She bore eight children by Jefferson, four of whom survived and went free. She was a helpmate who became Monticello housemistress and was often in conflict with his daughter (and her niece) Martha Randolph.

When their affair began in Paris, Sally was a free woman, for France did not acknowledge slavery.  Pregnant with their first child from what Norm describes as a romance consummated between exceptional equals, Sally chose Thomas over freedom and returned willingly to enslavement in Virginia.

Norm contends Jefferson would not have spent 38 years faithfully—in a relationship he defended uncompromisingly and quietly—with a woman of any less character and commitment.

Diagnosing Jefferson

Evidence of a Condition that Guided His Beliefs, Behavior, and Personal Associations

A turning point in how the world views autism

When the movie Adam was released in 2009, it became clear that Norm’s books have influenced public perceptions of autism, especially the higher functioning form, Asperger’s Syndrome. Two contributions are evident: He popularized Dr. Temple Grandin’s thesis that those diagnosed with Asperger’s are capable of special talents arising from their fixations, and he furnished corroboration by examples in history.

After Norm identified Thomas Jefferson as a bearer of Asperger’s characteristics, other books and countless blogs credited him with opening people’s eyes to a positive side of the condition. Parents thanked him for turning their diagnosed teens’ lives around and giving them hope in a world where the youngsters had felt like aliens. In Adam the title character mentioned Jefferson, Einstein, and Mozart as “probably” having had Asperger’s, a hypothesis originating in Norm’s Diagnosing Jefferson in 2000 and extended in Asperger’s and Self-Esteem to include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and others in 2002. Jodi Picoult's 2010 best-selling novel House Rules also uses Norm's "big three" names now connected with Asperger's.

How did Norm arrive at his conclusions about Jefferson? He culled from numerous biographies all eccentricities of the Third President that had been mentioned by Jefferson’s contemporaries and had been carried forward by historians, unexamined for their cause and unexplained. For each idiosyncrasy Norm studied context—the circumstances, the settings, the pressures as they appeared to affect Jefferson’s choices, behavior, and at times his point of view.

After Future Horizons, Inc., of Arlington, Texas, agreed to pick up the manuscript that had earlier been contracted to a New York publisher (which had gone belly-up), Norm spotted a coincidence on NBC’s Today. In an interview about the DNA link between Jefferson and his offspring by Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson Foundation official Dianne Swann-Wright said, “There was a personal side of Thomas Jefferson that many of us just simply haven’t been able to understand.” Observing that interview on January 27, 2000, Norm whispered, “Bingo.”

For its first two years in print, Diagnosing Jefferson was one of the top ten sellers among more than 600 Jefferson biographies on Amazon. Dozens of authors have since repeated the book’s findings in their own works on Asperger’s Syndrome. The conclusions Norm reached that Jefferson was on the autism/Asperger’s continuum are widely accepted on the evidence he presented. He matched all eccentricities with standards and criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, published in 1994 by the American Psychiatric Association.

Norm persists in arguing, however, that Asperger’s is neither a disorder nor, necessarily, a disability, but rather a condition from which there may arise unique achievements.