Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas by Ted Cruz is a 2026 biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Based on extensive interviews with Thomas and Cruz’s personal knowledge of him, the book examines his childhood, education, political evolution, confirmation battle, Supreme Court career, and originalist judicial philosophy. Cruz portrays Thomas as a misunderstood but highly consequential justice whose willingness to follow his constitutional principles has increasingly influenced the Court
What if everything you thought you knew about Clarence Thomas came from a source that never actually talked to him?
This question sits at the heart of Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas, Senator Ted Cruz’s new book on the Supreme Court justice. It’s built on more than nine hours of exclusive, one-on-one interviews with Thomas himself, the kind of access no other biographer has ever gotten. For anyone who wants to understand the man behind the robe, this book offers something rare: Thomas’s own voice, explaining his life and jurisprudence directly.
Overview
Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas is Senator Ted Cruz’s fifth book, published in August 2026 by Sentinel (an imprint of Penguin Random House). It’s part biography, part judicial philosophy primer, and part personal tribute from someone who knows the justice both professionally and personally.
Cruz draws on his own experience as a former Supreme Court clerk (for Chief Justice William Rehnquist), as a Supreme Court litigator who argued nine cases before the Court, and as a decades-long friend of Thomas. The book is built around more than nine hours of one-on-one interviews Cruz conducted with Thomas in his chambers.
The book’s central thesis is straightforward: Clarence Thomas is one of the most consequential, and most misunderstood, figures in American history. Cruz argues that Thomas’s jurisprudence, rooted in originalism and a commonsense approach to the Constitution, has been vindicated over time.
The title comes from Thomas’s frequent willingness in his opinions to “go further” than his colleagues, to push originalist reasoning to its logical conclusion even when it meant standing alone. As Cruz puts it, “there has never been a justice on the Court who is more willing to go further, to go back to the original Constitution, to go back to the original understanding of the Constitution, and if a precedent is wrong, overrule it”.
Who Will Actually Love This Book, and Who Should Bounce
This book is for people who want to understand Clarence Thomas beyond the caricatures. If you’ve ever wondered how a man who grew up speaking Geechee in segregated Georgia, who nearly became a priest, who was a left-wing radical in college, ended up as the Supreme Court’s most consistent originalist, this book answers that question. It’s also for anyone interested in how the Supreme Court actually works, from someone who’s been inside it.
That said, if you’re looking for a neutral, academic biography, this isn’t it. Cruz is upfront about his admiration. The book is a defense, even a celebration, of Thomas and his jurisprudence. Critics have called it “hagiography”.
If you already believe Thomas is a dangerous figure, this book probably won’t change your mind. But if you’re open to understanding why so many conservatives view him as a hero, Going Further makes that case in detail.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas by Senator Ted Cruz. Published in August 2026 by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller upon release.
Context
The book is a blend of biography, legal analysis, and personal reflection. Cruz writes from a unique vantage point: he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, and has known Thomas for three decades.
The book covers Thomas’s life from his birth in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, through his confirmation battle in 1991, and up to his current status as the second-longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history.
Purpose
The book’s central argument is that Clarence Thomas has been systematically misunderstood and maligned, and that his jurisprudence, rooted in originalism and a deep commitment to the Constitution’s text, has been proven right over time.
Cruz writes that he wanted to tell Thomas’s story because “in this time of division and anger, young people need role models. They need heroes”. He also wanted “to explain his jurisprudence in a way that is real, in a way that is accessible”.
2. Background
To understand Going Further, you need to understand the context in which it was written. Clarence Thomas has been on the Supreme Court since 1991. His confirmation was the narrowest in a century, 52 to 48. The hearings were dominated by Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment, which Thomas denied in dramatic fashion, calling the process “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves”.
For years after joining the Court, Thomas was a lonely voice. He often dissented alone. His silence during oral arguments was widely commented on, and widely misinterpreted. Critics called him dumb, said his clerks wrote his opinions, and suggested he was simply following Justice Scalia.
But over three decades, that narrative has shifted.
Thomas is now the Court’s senior justice and its most consistent originalist. Many of the positions he staked out alone, on gun rights, on federal power, on affirmative action, have become majority opinions. As Cruz argues, Thomas “played the long game. He won”.
3. Going Further Summary: What I Learned
This is the heart of the book. Let me walk you through what I took away from it.
The Making of Clarence Thomas: From Pin Point to the Supreme Court
The book opens with Thomas’s origins in Pin Point, Georgia, a tiny town founded by freed slaves. He was born in 1948 into what Cruz calls “bleak poverty”. His first home was “a shanty with no bathroom and no electricity except for a single light in the living room”.
When he was seven, his mother, unable to care for him and his brother, sent them to live with their grandparents.
That grandfather, Myers Anderson, is the central figure of Thomas’s early life. Anderson had only nine months of formal education. He couldn’t read or write. But he built a small business delivering fuel oil, and he instilled in his grandsons a fierce work ethic. His favorite saying was “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him”. Another was “If it don’t make no damn sense, then it don’t make no damn sense”, a piece of “commonsense wisdom that flows through Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence”.
Thomas’s grandfather was tough. When Thomas complained about the work, Anderson would say things like “Slavery is over,” to which the grandfather replied, “Not in my house”.
But he also gave Thomas something priceless: a chance. As Cruz writes, Anderson “sat my brother and me down at the kitchen table in August of 1955 and committed the rest of their lives to us so that we could have a chance”.
The Priesthood That Wasn’t
Thomas initially wanted to be a priest. He attended Saint John Vianney seminary in Georgia, one of only two Black students there. The racism was relentless. A classmate passed him a note that read “I like Martin Luther King… dead”. Another time, someone snapped the head off his statue of St. Jude, twice.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Thomas heard another student shout, “That’s good. I hope that son of a bitch dies”. That was the moment he knew the priesthood wasn’t for him.
The Angry Young Man
Thomas left the seminary and enrolled at Holy Cross. He became, in his own words, “an angry Black man”. He wore military fatigues and combat boots. He marched in protests, including the Harvard Square riot in 1970. He read Marx and Malcolm X. He considered himself a left-wing radical.
But something changed during that riot. The next morning, he knelt outside a chapel and prayed: “Almighty God, I promise you that if you would purge my heart of anger, I will never hate again”. It wasn’t an instant transformation, he still voted for George McGovern in 1972, but it was the beginning of a long journey back to the principles his grandfather had taught him.
Yale Law School and the “Taint of Racial Preference”
Thomas enrolled at Yale Law School in 1971. He found it deeply alienating. His professors didn’t teach the Constitution; they taught theory. As he told Cruz, “At Yale, we didn’t read the Constitution”.
Worse, he felt the stigma of affirmative action. He’d checked the box identifying himself as Black on his application, something he would regret for the rest of his life. A third-year Black student pulled him aside and said, “So, you must be one of the ones who’s here on merit”. Thomas felt that his Yale degree was worthless “when it had the taint of racial preference on it”. He peeled a “fifteen cents” sticker off a cigar box and stuck it on his Yale diploma, then put it in his basement.
Finding His Way: Danforth, Sowell, and the Shift to the Right
After law school, Thomas struggled to find a job. He was rejected by dozens of top law firms. Then he took a job with Missouri Attorney General John Danforth, who would become a lifelong mentor.
Working in the criminal appeals division, Thomas encountered cases that shook his left-wing assumptions. He read about a Black man convicted of raping and sodomizing a Black woman while holding a can opener to her son’s throat. “This man,” Thomas realized, “was no political prisoner, he was a vicious thug”. He began to see that “blacks were responsible for almost 80 percent of violent crimes committed against blacks”. “That,” he wrote, “was a bitter pill to swallow”.
Around this time, a friend told Thomas to read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics. Thomas had thrown Sowell’s earlier book in the trash at Yale, declaring, “No Black man has a right to think this way”. Now he devoured it. Sowell’s argument, that the path to prosperity for Black Americans comes from within the Black community, not from government, resonated deeply.
The EEOC Years
Thomas ran the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He transformed the agency, moving it away from quota-based enforcement toward individual discrimination cases. He hired the best legal minds he could find.
It was during this period that he hired Anita Hill, a decision he would come to regret. Hill had underperformed at the Department of Education, but Thomas hired her as a favor to a friend. She followed him to the EEOC and demanded the largest office. When Thomas recommended her for a job at Oral Roberts University in 1983, he didn’t mention her performance issues. He thought he was done with her.
The Confirmation: “High-Tech Lynching”
The book’s account of the 1991 confirmation hearings is gripping. Cruz doesn’t gloss over the details. He describes how Senator Joe Biden, then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Thomas the hearings “aren’t meant to be an ordeal” and promised “softball questions”. Then Biden threw a “beanball straight at his head”.
When Anita Hill’s allegations leaked, Thomas was devastated. He wrote his response by hand between midnight and five in the morning. His statement to the committee is quoted in full:
“Mr. Chairman, I am a victim of this process. My name has been harmed. My integrity has been harmed. My character has been harmed. My family has been harmed. My friends have been harmed. There is nothing this committee, this body, or this country can do to give me my good name back. Nothing”.
And then the line that changed everything:
“From my standpoint, as a Black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas”.
The Senate confirmed Thomas 52–48. He was forty-three years old.
The Justice: “Tilting at Windmills”
Once on the Court, Thomas found himself frequently alone. In conference, the other eight justices would vote one way, and he would vote the other. Justice Byron White took him aside and said, “Clarence, if you think that way, you vote that way”.
Thomas became close with Antonin Scalia, who shared his originalist philosophy. But there was a difference. Scalia was willing to let some bad precedents stand, he once said, “I’m an originalist. I’m a textualist. I’m not a nut”. Thomas, by contrast, was willing to overturn virtually any precedent he believed was wrong.
Scalia would read Thomas’s draft opinions and say, “Clarence, you’re tilting at windmills”. Thomas would reply, “Nino, windmills are dangerous”.
That exchange gives the book its title.
The Jurisprudence: Going Further
Cruz walks through several of Thomas’s most important opinions:
Printz v. United States (1997): Thomas was the only justice to urge that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, more than a decade before Heller.
Grutter v. Bollinger (2003): Thomas dissented from the Court’s decision upholding affirmative action, writing that “the Constitution abhors classifications based on race”. His dissent laid the groundwork for the Court’s eventual decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023).
Kelo v. City of New London (2005): Thomas dissented from the Court’s decision allowing the government to take private property for economic development. He wrote that the Court had “erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution”.
McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010): Thomas concurred in the result but argued that the right to bear arms should be grounded in the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, not substantive due process.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022): Thomas joined the majority overturning Roe v. Wade but went further, urging the Court to reconsider all substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.
The Man Behind the Robe
Perhaps the most surprising part of the book is the portrait of Thomas as a person. Inside the Supreme Court, Cruz writes, Thomas is “universally adored”. He knows the names of every clerk, including those of his ideological adversaries. He talks to janitors and police officers, learns their kids’ names, and performs hundreds of acts of kindness that never get reported.
Cruz recounts a story about Thomas giving a young boy from rural Arkansas a Super Bowl ticket encased in Lucite, on the condition that the boy get all A’s in school. Another time, Thomas befriended a homeless man years earlier at the EEOC; when the man called out to him on the street decades later, Thomas stopped to talk.
Thomas’s famous silence during oral arguments wasn’t stupidity or trauma. Cruz argues it was simply that Thomas wanted to hear the advocates make their case without interruption. When the Court adopted a new format during COVID, with structured time for each justice to ask questions, Thomas began speaking regularly.
4. Going Further Analysis: My Take on Going Further
Going Further is an important book, but it’s also a deeply partisan one. That’s not a criticism, Cruz is transparent about his admiration for Thomas. But it means the book should be read with that context in mind.
What works: Cruz’s access is unparalleled. The nine-plus hours of interviews with Thomas yield details and anecdotes that no other biographer could have gotten. The book is also remarkably readable. Cruz writes the way Thomas writes, clearly, directly, without legal jargon. He wants ordinary people to understand constitutional law, and he largely succeeds.
What’s less convincing: Cruz sometimes glosses over complexities. He presents Thomas’s originalism as self-evidently correct, without engaging seriously with counterarguments. The book also has a clear political agenda, it’s written, in part, to burnish Cruz’s own credentials as a constitutional conservative. When NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Cruz whether the book tells us what kind of Supreme Court justice he would be, Cruz said he doesn’t want to be a judge, but the book certainly reads like a job application for something.
Still, even critics acknowledge the book’s value. As one left-leaning outlet put it, Cruz has “bashed out a weird book about a weird guy”, but it’s a book that captures something real about Thomas’s life and jurisprudence.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths:
Unparalleled access: Cruz’s personal relationship with Thomas gives the book a depth no other biography could match.
Clarity: Cruz explains complex legal concepts in plain English, following Thomas’s own example.
Humanity: The book shows Thomas as a person, his humor, his kindness, his resilience.
Historical context: Cruz situates Thomas’s life in the broader sweep of American history, from Jim Crow to the present.
Weaknesses:
Partisanship: The book is unapologetically a defense of Thomas and his jurisprudence. It doesn’t engage seriously with critics.
Hagiography: Cruz is so admiring that he sometimes glosses over complexities and contradictions.
Political agenda: The book reads, at times, like a vehicle for Cruz’s own political ambitions.
Limited engagement with counterarguments: Cruz presents originalism as the only legitimate approach to constitutional interpretation, without addressing its critics in any depth.
6. Comparison with Similar Works
Going Further joins a small but growing library of books about Clarence Thomas:
My Grandfather’s Son (2007): Thomas’s own memoir. It’s powerful and moving, but it ends with his confirmation. Cruz’s book covers the thirty-plus years on the Court that Thomas’s memoir doesn’t touch.
Supreme Discomfort (2007): Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher’s biography. It’s more balanced but less personal. Cruz’s book has the advantage of Thomas’s direct cooperation.
The People’s Justice (2023): Judge Amul Thapar’s book on Thomas. It’s excellent but focuses more on Thomas’s jurisprudence than his life. Cruz’s book is broader.
Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution (2019): Myron Magnet’s book. It’s a defense of Thomas’s originalism, but it doesn’t have Cruz’s personal access.
In terms of genre, Going Further is closest to a “biography of ideas”, it’s as much about Thomas’s jurisprudence as his life. It’s also, in some ways, a memoir of Cruz’s own relationship with Thomas.
7. Conclusion
Going Further is a remarkable book. It’s not neutral, Cruz doesn’t pretend to be. But it’s honest about its purposes. It tells the story of a man who rose from abject poverty to become one of the most consequential jurists in American history. It explains his jurisprudence clearly and accessibly. And it makes a compelling case that Clarence Thomas has been vindicated by history.
Who should read this book?
- Law students and legal professionals: Cruz explains Thomas’s jurisprudence in a way that’s both rigorous and accessible.
- Conservatives: This book will deepen your appreciation for Thomas and his legacy.
- Anyone interested in the Supreme Court: Even if you disagree with Thomas, this book will help you understand why he thinks the way he does.
- Young people: Cruz wrote the book, in part, as a model for young people who need heroes.
Who should skip it?
- Readers looking for a neutral biography: This isn’t that.
- Readers who already dislike Thomas: This book is unlikely to change your mind.
Final verdict: Going Further is a valuable contribution to our understanding of Clarence Thomas. It’s not the last word, but it’s an important one. As Cruz writes, Thomas has “held power without being corrupted by it. He has endured seemingly unendurable hatred without becoming hateful himself”. That’s a story worth telling.
