When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was new to the national scene. Of the many questions reporters asked to fill in the picture of the man, one was almost impossible for him to answer: his favorite book. A voracious speed reader, proficient in Spanish, with a vast and eclectic taste in literature, he had taken hundreds of authors to heart. Forced to decide, Carter chose James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941), which documented the depredations that Southern sharecroppers suffered in the Great Depression.
“Agee’s style of writing was sobering,” President Carter told me one afternoon in Plains, Ga., in 1993. “I admired his autobiographical novel ‘A Death in the Family,’ and his book ‘Letters of James Agee to Father Flye’ was beautiful. But the press wanted one, not three, so I chose ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ His vivid description of the kind of family life that I knew — at least among our neighbors in Plains in my early and formative years — was hauntingly spot on.”
In 1993, when I was writing a biography of Carter — what became “The Unfinished Presidency” — we engaged in a long conversation about books that mattered to him. His omnipresent recall of minute detail from the Bible to Toni Morrison was on full display. Encyclopedic on all aspects of Georgia history and literature, he at one point launched into a vigorous defense of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. “I’m pleased that Black writers like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray took Uncle Remus stories seriously,” he said. “They forgave Harris’s sins of cultural appropriation of the vernacular because it’s a central part of all Southern dialects. You can’t be a Southerner — Black or white — and not know who Tar Baby, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox are.”
When Carter had entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis during World War II, there was a national debate over who was a greater Southern writer, William Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell. Deriding Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” as vulgar sex-peddling and “an insult to the South,” he touted Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930) as a far superior work of fiction. “Faulkner gave an intriguing picture of Southern small-town life and interrelationships among white people,” Carter told me. “He would bring in Negro characters on occasion, but he mainly showed the historical white family existence based on pride on having fought in the Civil War and coming home.” Carter was enthralled by Faulkner’s novella “Spotted Horses.” “I’d read that story aloud to my three sons,” he said. “Flem Snopes — a character who sold untamed ponies to foolish buyers — reminded me of a friend in Macon.”
“After Faulkner,” the president continued, “I grew infatuated with Dylan Thomas.” Why a Welsh poet? Carter’s interest started his first year home from the Navy, when he was working in a warehouse: “In my free time, I read,” he said. “I encountered Thomas in an anthology of modern poetry. His poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ took my breath away. The last line in particular: ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ It kind of caught my eye and I read the poem over again and tried to figure out what he was saying. I diagramed Thomas’s sentences, like an engineer would with a spreadsheet, trying to figure them out. And then, later, I would read Dylan Thomas poems to my children.”
When Carter entered politics, he sought to inject Thomas’s poems into the public discourse the way John F. Kennedy had with Robert Frost’s. When he attended his first Group of 7 conference as president, in London, Prime Minister James Callaghan asked what he wanted to do for entertainment. “I said I wanted to go visit Dylan Thomas’s birthplace,” the president recalled. “The prime minister arranged for me to do that. But while I was in Westminster Abbey, I told the archbishop I wanted to see the Poets’ Corner, and when I got there I said, ‘Where is the plaque to Dylan Thomas?’ And he told me that they didn’t have one because Thomas was not the kind of person they wanted to honor. I said … ‘What does it matter, it’s the art, not anything else that counts.’”
Carter was so inspired by Thomas that he started writing poems. The verse of Carl Sandburg, James Dickey, James Whitehead and Miller Williams, in particular, informed his folksy style. “What I stayed away from was surrealism,” Carter laughed. “I’m an engineer and that imaginary world isn’t accessible to me.” When Carter had around 40 poems that he liked, he published a collection, “Always a Reckoning,” in 1995.
When it came to American history, Carter’s abiding passion was the Civil War. He was a fan of historians, and Shelby Foote, James McPherson and John Hope Franklin were his favorites. And Carter advocated, like a publicist, on behalf of Eric Foner’s seminal “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877″ (1988). When I unfairly pushed him to recommend a single Civil War-era book, he unhesitatingly said “The Southern Side; or, Andersonville Prison,” by R. Randolph Stevenson. At Andersonville, Ga., 45,000 Northern prisoners of war were held during the last 14 months of the war in conditions so inhumane that 13,000 died. Stevenson was the doctor in charge.
“He tabulated every death that occurred in Andersonville,” Carter explained, “and there is a narrative with it.” Stevenson points out that Robert E. Lee tried to swap prisoners because he couldn’t feed them. He just didn’t have any money, and Grant refused to swap. Then Lee offered to swap two prisoners for one just so he wouldn’t have to see them suffer. Grant still refused, possibly because he thought at one time feeding 30,000 prisoners was a great burden on the South. The commandant of the prison was court-martialed and executed at the end of the war.
“When I read that book,” Carter said, “I went over to Andersonville to try and interpret where the events took place.”
While Carter enjoyed discussing the personalities of fellow U.S. presidents — Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Truman, in particular — novels touched his conscience more than nonfiction. Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” (1982) moved him, he said. “She was from Georgia, which was a gold star in her favor. But her character Celie, a young, poor, Black woman growing up in a Jim Crow world, shattered me. … The sexual abuse Celie endured made me cringe.” With a preference for Southern writers, Carter also praised Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel “Cross Creek” (1942) and Flannery O’Connor’s short-story collection “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965). The female writer Carter “learned the most from” was Erica Jong, author of the second-wave feminist classic “Fear of Flying” (1973). “Carter wrote my mother a fan note,” the journalist Molly Jong-Fast told me. “Our family loved him for that!”
One day in 1996, while I was in Carter’s living room in Plains waiting for him to emerge from his bedroom for another interview, I leisurely perused his book-packed shelves. With the notable exceptions of books by Richard Neustadt, Theodore H. White and James MacGregor Burns, there were few political science volumes. “Who wants to read about politics?” he laughed when I noted this. “I’d rather turn to Scripture, fly-fishing, poetry or Tolstoy. Or National Geographic books. Anything but politics.”
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