Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 today and is the longest-lived U.S. president in history, holds another, less noticed distinction: He’s the most prolific author of any president in a century. Mr. Carter has written or co-written 32 books in his lifetime, 20 of which became New York Times best sellers.
But that expansive literary legacy has a flip side. Just 16 books written by others that prominently deal with Mr. Carter or his administration have made the best-seller list, a stark contrast to the dozens of volumes lavished on every other modern president.
The result is a striking fact: Mr. Carter, who remains in hospice care, was in many ways a president who had a lot more to say than has been said about him.
That ratio — best sellers written by a president before, during and after his presidency versus best sellers written about him — can be calculated for commanders in chief going back to 1931, when The Times first began tracking hardcover nonfiction book sales. Doing so reveals a few patterns.
The clearest lesson is that while Americans like to read and write about their presidents, they don’t read or write about all of them equally. Nor is every president equally inclined to leave a legacy measured in volumes.
Presidencies that coincide with moments of national upheaval tend to leave the biggest mark in print. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald J. Trump — who has published five Times best sellers, including a book of photos last month — has had the most best sellers written about him, by allies, critics, former officials, family members, rival politicians and journalists. Franklin Roosevelt’s much-chronicled 12-year tenure overlapped with the Depression and World War II, though his death in office prevented him from writing about many of those events himself. George W. Bush, whose response to the Sept. 11 attacks has been a frequent subject for other writers, has published a memoir, a book about his father (the first President Bush) and two collections of paintings.
Stardom and scandal can also sell presidential books. John F. Kennedy, one of whose pre-White House best sellers won a Pulitzer Prize, was mythologized in dozens of volumes after his 1963 assassination. Barack Obama, an accomplished author before becoming president who has since published the first installment of his White House memoirs, occasioned both hate reads and fawning. The controversies that rocked Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton yielded investigative page-turners, partisan potboilers and the stack of books both men wrote after leaving office. That could be because both men had more incentive to try to shape their legacies; Mr. Clinton’s latest book, a memoir of his life after the presidency, is due out next month.
Ronald Reagan, whose post-presidential memoir was largely ghostwritten, has also attracted significant interest from readers while leaving behind few books of his own. Still other commanders in chief, including Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson, wrote little and have received comparatively little attention. (Although Mr. Johnson is the subject of a series of award-winning doorstoppers by Robert Caro, who at 88 is still working on the highly anticipated fifth volume.)
In this analysis we included only books that were either entirely about a president or explored his life or his presidency at length. But determining how much a book is truly “about” a president is more art than science. The books we included may mention a president or his administration directly in the title or subtitle; others may have only referred to him on the jacket, in a publisher’s materials or in chapters. But our goal was to capture every book offering a substantial study of a president that was also devoured by enough of the public to become a best seller. Our list omits general histories and titles that span a wide range of administrations, like “Forty-Two Years in the White House,” a 1934 memoir by an usher who served 10 presidents.
Still, as the only modern president who has written more best sellers than have been written about him, Mr. Carter is in a league of his own. “It’s true that he has written a lot, and it’s also true that he’s kind of an overlooked president,” said Kai Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer whose book about Mr. Carter, “The Outlier,” was published in 2021.
The reason so few best sellers have focused on Mr. Carter’s time in office is fairly easy to explain: In the popular imagination, his presidency was viewed as a fiasco. Besieged by inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran, it ended with a landslide loss to Mr. Reagan after just four years. “There was less interest among publishers, less interest among editors or journalists or academics to tackle a subject for which they thought, ‘Oh, this is a figure that is regarded by most Americans as a failure,’” Mr. Bird said. The handful of best sellers that deal with Mr. Carter’s presidency in depth include retrospectives by his wife, Rosalynn, who died last year at 96, and by Hamilton Jordan, his former chief of staff.
But Mr. Carter’s presidency was more consequential than is commonly remembered, said Stuart E. Eizenstat, his chief domestic policy adviser in the White House. Eizenstat’s 2018 book argued that Mr. Carter notched significant but overlooked wins, including on energy, the environment and foreign policy. “Then Reagan takes over, captivates the country, and Carter is forgotten,” Mr. Eizenstat said. (Though comprehensive and well regarded, neither his nor Mr. Bird’s books made The Times’s best-seller charts.)
Why did Mr. Carter write so much relative to his presidential peers? After leaving the White House and moving back to his hometown, Plains, Ga., at the tender age of 56, he had plenty of time on his hands. Denied a second term, he focused on many of the subjects that would probably have occupied it, from curing disease to U.S. policy in the Middle East. (One such book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” ignited a firestorm for its criticisms of Israel.)
Mr. Carter’s oeuvre also displays a roving intelligence. It includes books on woodworking and religion, a collection of his paintings, as well as poetry and a novel. Books became Mr. Carter’s principal source of income as his writing and humanitarian work eclipsed his presidency in Americans’ collective memory.
Of course, not all of Mr. Carter’s best sellers met with praise. A review in The Times panned “Keeping Faith,” his 1982 memoir of his White House years, as “flat and impersonal.” His 2001 memoir about growing up in segregated rural Georgia, by contrast, was a Pulitzer finalist.
“He out-writes what’s written about him,” said Meredith Evans, the director of the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, which houses his administration’s papers. “Which may be why people don’t always write about him.”
But Mr. Carter’s high ratio may not last forever. Other recent books that deal with him include a 2020 biography by the journalist Jonathan Alter; a polemic by the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel that compared President Biden’s tenure to Mr. Carter’s; an unfinished chronicle of the Carter administration by the historian Leo Ribuffo, published posthumously last year; and a study of Mr. Carter’s post presidency (along with that of six other presidents) by Jared Cohen, which cracked The Times’s best-seller list in March.
Though visits to Mr. Carter’s presidential museum have generally declined since its opening in 1986, attendance has tended to spike when he is in the news, Dr. Evans said, and public interest in his presidency could rise in the years to come: “I think you’re going to find that people will look at him differently and want to know more.”
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