Over the past decade, 11 books on America's founding fathers have been best sellers, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis.

It's not clear if "American Creation" will be the 12th, but the public appears far from bored with stories about the country's original "Great Men." Ellis, a professor at Mount Holyoke College, is more than willing to continue the conversation.

		"AMERICAN CREATION: TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES AT THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC" By Joseph Ellis Knopf ($26.95)

And why not? He's not just an academic historian but a gifted writer who can hold his own with David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Stephen Ambrose and other authors of best-selling, character-driven patriotic narratives for readers who skipped American history in college and, years later, wanted to know more.

Of course, they might not actually learn all that much on today's college campuses, Ellis implies darkly.

There, in left-wing academia, the "hegemonic narrative" portrays the founders "as racists, classists and sexists, a kind of rogues' gallery rather than a gallery of greats," he complains.

To put that perceived wrong to rights, Ellis wrote "Founding Brothers" in 2001, which earned him a Pulitzer and the National Book Award. In it, he told us who our nation builders were:

Talented, flawed, ambitious men and, as a group, diverse in temperament and belief and with a unique chemistry that nurtured intellectual ferment and political creativity.

"American Creation," a kind of sequel to "Founding Brothers," is similarly episodic in nature, confronting the subject from unexpected angles in a search for greater clarity.

Here, Ellis tell us not only how these great, imperfect men won a violent revolution, but how they secured it.

In creating a stable nation with sovereign authority over 13 self-interested, disputatious ex-colonies, they managed, even if a strong federal government contradicted the Revolution's principles.

This messy endeavor defied careful planning and, despite the occasional brilliant epiphany, mostly involved luck and the ability "to improvise on the edge of catastrophe."

While there are flashes of the professor in his prose, Ellis deftly braids analysis and storytelling together in six essays about six "moments" where things went right, or, in two instances, very wrong, for the founders and the nation.

Their failure to resolve the issue of slavery and provide a just settlement for Native Americans are the tragedies referred to in the book's subtitle.

In "The Conspiracy" chapter, Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison plot to undercut the federal government's powers, sensing a threat to their state's interests and slavery.

One of the most compelling chapters, "The Winter," details George Washington's hard slog at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-'78.

Ultimately, the frustrations of negotiating with 13 different states for supplies convinced Washington and his officers that a weak, decentralized government could not sustain a revolution.

Indeed, "It is no accident," Ellis writes "that the leadership of the Federalist Party which included Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall, shared the sufferings of the Valley Forge winter and achieved the sense that a fully empowered central government was necessary to win the war and oversee the peace."

Some critics have challenged Ellis' central thesis that ours was an "evolutionary revolution," by creating "a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end."

That's one way to look at it, especially today, when argument still rages on about federal power and the individual's right to be free of it.

Still, postponing resolution of the question of states' rights, and by extension, slavery, would lead an increasingly divided nation into civil war 80 years later.

Ellis acknowledges this defect, but any effort to force the issue "would have probably killed the infant American republic in the cradle."

Some people read books to help them fall asleep at night; the fluent, bracing historical arguments in "American Creation" will keep the reader very much awake.

Keep talking, Mr. Ellis.