Alfred Lavern Bush (born January 5, 1933) is an American curator, writer, and editor. He was Curator of Western Americana at the Princeton University Library. Bush was an editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, where his study of Jefferson images produced The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (1962). He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles, many of which pertain to Native Americans. Early life and education Born in Denver, Colorado, into a fifth-generation Mormon family, Bush graduated from Brigham Young University in 1957, where he continued graduate studies in archaeology before joining the Fifth University Archaeological Society excavations at the Maya site of Aguacatal in western Campeche, Mexico, in the winter of 1958. The following summer he was a student at the Institute for Archival and Historical Management at Radcliffe College. A mountain climber in his youth, Bush climbed in the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, and the Swiss Alps. He subsequently served as curator of the American Alpine Club’s museum in New York City. Bush served in the Medical Service Corps of the US Army in the Panama Canal Zone during the Korean War. Bush's legally adopted son, Paul Tioux, is an enrolled member of Tesuque Pueblo. Tioux's three daughters have given birth to nine children, Bush's great-grandchildren. Career From 1958 through 1962 Bush was an editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. His publication The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (1962) has subsequently gone through several editions, including two published by the National Gallery of Art, in The Eye of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson and the Arts, both edited by William Howard Adams. Bush discovered the lost 1800 portrait of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, which was announced in his 1962 monograph. This image of the president has since eclipsed all others and is the painting most familiar to the public; it now hangs in the White House and is featured on the Jefferson nickel. Bush proposed and in 1971 created an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York of ancient Maya hieroglyphic texts, mostly on pottery. The catalog by Michael D. Coe revolutionized the study of texts on Maya ceramics and accelerated the eventual decipherment of the ancient American writing system. The show also brought to light for the first time what purported to be the fourth surviving Maya codex. Highly controversial, this book went through extensive tests over the next half century and