WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - One of
Modern Library's 100 best nonfiction books of all time - One of
Esquire's 50 best biographies of all time
**
"A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle."--Time
**
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.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international
prestige. 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. 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."
The rest of this book tells the story of TR's irresistible rise to
power. During the years 1858-1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed
himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. 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. 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. 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. As assistant secretary of the navy, he
almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. 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. In what he called his "spare hours" he
fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator
Mark Hanna called "that damned cowboy" was vice president. Seven months
later, an assassin's bullet gave TR the national leadership he had
always craved.
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. This book, the only full study of TR's pre-presidential years,
shows that he was an inevitable chief executive. "It was as if he were
subconsciously aware that he was a man of many selves," the author
writes, "and set about developing each one in turn, knowing that one day
he would be President of all the people."
