It’s not so much a change of heart, and about longstanding relationship. When it began and what the character of the relationship is we probably can’t know easily or at all. But it was, without question, an enduring one. American Sphinx a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. It won the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Joseph J. Ellis’s American Sphinx is a brief and elegant return to Monticello. Mr. Ellis is a remarkably clear writer, mercifully free of both the groveling and the spirit of attack that have dominated the subject in the past American Sphinx’ is fresh and uncluttered but rich in historical context.