Described by the Chicago Tribune as "a classic," The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001 marks the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt becoming president.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Biographies & Memoirs

Morris, Edmund

Leaders & Notable People

Coward, McCann

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Raegan

Random House, Inc.

“Brilliant....This book is a perfect marriage—or should one say, duet—of subject and author, every word as masterly as the notes of the artist it illuminates.” — Christopher Buckley, Forbes
“This is not just criticism but poetry in itself, with the additional—and inestimable—merit of being true.” — Washington Post Book World 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Dutch) is one of America’s most distinguished biographers, known for his rich, compulsively readable prose style. His biography of Beethoven, one of the most admired composers in the history of music, is above all a study of genius in action, of one of the few giants of Western culture. Beethoven is another engaging entry in the HarperCollins’ “Eminent Lives” series of biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)

Humor & Entertainment

HARPER/COLLINS

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. A lifelong devotee, Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence—a gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

Harper-perennial

Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. “If I see another king,” he joked, “I think I shall bite him.” Had TR won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just. This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Colonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his “journey into the Pleistocene”—a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Some readers will be repulsed by TR’s bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing. Although TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. By the end of the summer, in his famous “New Nationalism” speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal. (TR’s fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel “was the greatest man I ever knew.”) Then follows a detailed account of TR’s reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. This volume gives as much consideration to TR’s literary achievements and epic expedition to Brazil in 1913–1914 as to his fatherhood of six astonishingly different children, his spiritual and aesthetic beliefs, and his eager embrace of other cultures—from Arab and Magyar to German and American Indian. It is impossible to read Colonel Roosevelt and not be awed by the man’s universality. The Colonel himself remarked, “I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know.” Morris does not hesitate, however, to show how pathologically TR turned upon those who inherited the power he craved—the hapless Taft, the adroit Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson declined to bring the United States into World War I in 1915 and 1916, the Colonel blasted him with some of the worst abuse ever uttered by a former chief executive. Yet even Wilson had to admit that behind the Rooseveltian will to rule lay a winning idealism and decency. “He is just like a big boy—there is a sweetness about him that you can’t resist.” That makes the story of TR’s last year, when the “boy” in him died, all the sadder in the telling: the conclusion of a life of Aristotelian grandeur. From the Hardcover edition.

Colonel Roosevelt

Historical

Random House Audio |

Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex is the sequel to Edmund Morris’s classic bestseller The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years ago. A detailed prologue describes TR’s assumption of power and journey to Washington, with the assassinated President McKinley riding behind him like a ghost of the nineteenth century. (Trains rumble throughout this irresistibly moving narrative, as TR crosses and recrosses the nation.) Traveling south through a succession of haunting landscapes, TR encounters harbingers of all the major issues of the new century--Imperialism, Industrialism, Conservation, Immigration, Labor, Race--plus the overall challenge that intimidated McKinley: how to harness America’s new power as the world’s richest nation. Theodore Rex (the title is taken from a quip by Henry James) tells the story of the following seven and a half years--years in which TR entertains, infuriates, amuses, strong-arms, and seduces the body politic into a state of almost total subservience to his will. It is not always a pretty story: one of the revelations here is that TR was hated and feared by a substantial minority of his fellow citizens. Wall Street, the white South, Western lumber barons, even his own Republican leadership in Congress strive to harness his steadily increasing power. Within weeks of arrival in Washington, TR causes a nationwide sensation by becoming the first President to invite a black man to dinner in the White House. Next, he launches his famous prosecution of the Northern Securities Company, and follows up with landmark antitrust legislation. He liberates Cuba, determines the route of the Panama Canal, mediates the great Anthracite Strike, and resolves the Venezuela Crisis of 1902-1903 with such masterful secrecy that the world at large is unaware how near the United States and Germany have come to war. During an epic national tour in the spring of 1903, TR’s conservation philosophy (his single greatest gift to posterity) comes into full flower. He also bestows on countless Americans the richness of a personality without parallel--evangelical and passionate, yet lusty and funny; adroitly political, winningly natural, intellectually overwhelming. The most famous father of his time, he is adored by his six children (although beautiful, willful “Princess” Alice rebelled against him) and accepted as an honorary member of the White House Gang of seditious small boys. Theodore Rex, full of cinematic detail, moves with the exhilarating pace of a novel, yet it rides on a granite base of scholarship. TR’s own voice is constantly heard, as the President was a gifted letter writer and raconteur. Also heard are the many witticisms, sometimes mocking, yet always affectionate, of such Roosevelt intimates as Henry Adams, John Hay, and Elihu Root. (“Theodore is never sober,” said Adams, “only he is drunk with himself and not with rum.”) TR’s speed of thought and action, and his total command of all aspects of presidential leadership, from bureaucratic subterfuge to manipulation of the press, make him all but invincible in 1904, when he wins a second term by a historic landslide. Surprisingly, this victory transforms him from a patrician conservative to a progressive, responsible between 1905 and 1908 for a raft of enlightened legislation, including the Pure Food and Employer Liability acts. Even more surprising, to critics who have caricatured TR as a swinger of the Big Stick, is his emergence as a diplomat. He wins the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing about an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Interspersed with many stories of Rooseveltian triumphs are some bitter episodes--notably a devastating lynching--that remind us of America’s deep prejudices and fears. Theodore Rex does not attempt to justify TR’s notorious action following the Brownsville Incident of 1906--his worst mistake as President--but neither does this resolutely honest biography indulge in the easy wisdom of hindsight. It is written throughout in real time, reflecting the world as TR saw it. By the final chapter, as the great “Teddy” prepares to quit the White House in 1909, it will be a hard-hearted listener who does not share the sentiment of Henry Adams: “The old house will seem dull and sad when my Theodore has gone.”

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time Described by the Chicago Tribune as "a classic," The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. The publication of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt on September 14th, 2001 marks the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt becoming president.

Focuses on Roosevelt's pre-presidential career, covering the period between 1858 to 1901, during which time Roosevelt built himself up from a frail asthmatic youth to a robust man with varied interests

Ballantine Books

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize This is Morris's highly acclaimed account of Theodore Roosevelt's life, encompassing the years from Roosevelt's birth to his service in the White House. He was one of our most vibrant presidents; his image still haunts our past and our present. This fascinating and comprehensive biography of the extraordinary naturalist, adventurer, soldier, and politician, tells the improbable, but very real, story of a man determined to get what he wanted, an American who helped define our century and our very character.

Read by the Author 6 cassettes / 9 hours Edmund Morris has been absorbed in the life of Ronald Reagan for the last thirteen years, with unparalleled access to his papers, his friends, and his family. This audiobook will inform, engross, and even astonish those who believe they already know Ronald Reagan--as well as those who do not know him at all. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. An extraordinary relationship--genial yet mysterious on the President's side, admiring yet unsentimental on Morris's--developed between the two men. Reagan granted Morris monthly interviews in the Oval Office, plus unrestricted access to his papers and family and friends. The result, after fourteen years of obsessive research, is a biography that is as much a memoir as narrative--a pilgrimage to the heart of Ronald Reagan's mystery. It begins with his birth in 1911 in the heart of rural Illinois (where he is still remembered as "Dutch"), and progresses through the way stations of an amazingly varied career: young lifeguard, aspirant writer, ace sportscaster, film star, soldier, union leader, corporate spokesman, Governor, and President. Here, recreated with participatory vividness (and some original historic audio clips) are the early achievements of the Reagan Era: a restoration of American optimism and patriotism, a re-powering of the national economy, and a massive arms buildup deliberately forcing the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism to come to terms. Here, too, is the septuagenarian President who came to grips with some of the most fundamental moral issues of the late twentieth century--at Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, in Geneva and Reykjavik and Berlin. This audiobook closes with an achingly tender account of Reagan's pst-presidential decline into dementia.

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Arts & Literature

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Books by Morris, Edmund

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morris, Edmund. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Raegan

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (Eminent Lives)

Colonel Roosevelt

Theodore Rex

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan