The amount of material bearing on Paul Jones is very large, and consists mainly of his extensive correspondence, published and unpublished, his journals, memoirs by his private secretary and several of his officers, published and unpublished impressions by his contemporaries, and a number of sketches and biographies, some of which contain rich collections of his letters and extracts from his journals. The biographies which I have found most useful are the "Life," by John Henry Sherburne, published in 1825, which is mainly a collection of Jones's correspondence; another volume, composed largely of extracts from his letters and journals, called the "Janette-Taylor Collection," published in 1830; the first and only extended narrative at once readable and impartial, by Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, published in 1845; and the recently published "Life" by Augustus C. Buell. To Mr. Buell's exhaustive work I am indebted for considerable original material not otherwise accessible to me. On the basis of the foregoing mass of material I have attempted, in a short sketch, to give merely an unbiased account of the man.