Ask the Author: Craig Fehrman
Answered Questions (2)
Craig Fehrman
Great question! My book has thirteen chapters. Here are the presidents who star in those chapters:
1) Jefferson
2) Adams
3) Washington, plus Jefferson / Madison / Monroe
4) Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams
5) Lincoln
6) Grant
7) Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
8) Coolidge
9) Theodore Roosevelt / Coolidge / FDR
10) Truman
11) JFK
12) Reagan
13) Obama
There is a paragraph or two on a number of other presidents (Carter as the first to write on a personal computer, say, or Trump doing book signings at Waldenbooks). But this list shows the presidents who get extended treatment.
1) Jefferson
2) Adams
3) Washington, plus Jefferson / Madison / Monroe
4) Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams
5) Lincoln
6) Grant
7) Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
8) Coolidge
9) Theodore Roosevelt / Coolidge / FDR
10) Truman
11) JFK
12) Reagan
13) Obama
There is a paragraph or two on a number of other presidents (Carter as the first to write on a personal computer, say, or Trump doing book signings at Waldenbooks). But this list shows the presidents who get extended treatment.
Craig Fehrman
Thanks for the question! There are a bunch of them, actually, but John Adams stands out. Before I started my book, I had no idea he wrote the first presidential autobiography. And Adams was such an impulsive, emotional person. Here's how he described the feeling of doing careful, thoughtful writing: "painful and distressing . . . almost like a blow on the elbow or the knee." Adams was always blurting out what he was thinking in that moment, which made him fun to study -- and probably explains why he was able to write such a revealing book.
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