The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

This book, the only full study of TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief executive. His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated it as a series of haphazard episodes.

Seven months later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had always craved. By 1901, the man Senator Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. In what he called his “spare hours” he fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. After leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the governorship of New York. As assistant secretary of the navy, he almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police commissioner in New York City. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. Fresh out of Harvard, he simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New York State Assembly.

During the years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. The rest of this book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk-and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.” That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook 8,150 hands. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. This classic biography is the story of seven men-a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician-who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history. One of Esquire’s 50 best biographies of all time.One of Modern Library ’s 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris