As a governor of Georgia harboring higher aspirations, Jimmy Carter did like many other politicians who wanted to be president: He wrote a book declaring his vision for America. After leaving the White House, he wrote another book, a memoir offering his perspective on the conflicts and crises he navigated, just as presidents before and after him had done.
Then, he kept writing and writing and writing.
Publishing 32 books over the course of his life, he wasn’t simply prolific, as far as former presidents go. His output also displayed an extraordinary range that included historical fiction, poetry and meditations on the meaning of faith and the splendor of nature. There was even a coffee-table book on woodworking, a hobby of his.
“Of all our modern presidents, Jimmy Carter was America’s most protean author,” said Jonathan Karp, the president and chief executive of Simon and Schuster, which published 13 of Carter’s books.
The critics were not always kind. Not every book was a commercial success. Still, as a writer, Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, has left behind a body of work that was vast and invaluable, researchers and those who knew him well said. His memoirs, which cover virtually every chapter of his life, could be strikingly candid and intimate. His forays into different genres revealed an embrace of adventure and willingness to take a creative risk. And taken together, his books reflect the abounding curiosity and vigor that defined his approach to life.
“He took the time to really become a student before he tried to be a writer,” said Craig Fehrman, a journalist and historian who wrote “Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote.” “In a very craftsman-like and humble way, when he decided to write something new, he worked to learn that genre from the inside and dedicated some time to becoming as good at it as he could be.”
He added: “That’s the story of him as a writer, but I also think that’s a story about him as a human being.”
In his books, Carter relived his childhood on a peanut farm in Georgia (“An Hour Before Daylight” and “Christmas in Plains”) and outlined strategies for negotiating peace in the Middle East (“The Blood of Abraham,” “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” and “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land”). He explored religion and spirituality (“Faith: A Journey For All”) and discussed his favorite Bible verses, and he ruminated on the joys and pleasures that balance out the challenges of growing older (“The Virtues of Aging”). He decried unfair and criminal treatment of women around the world (“A Call to Action”) and celebrated the woman who raised him, Lillian Carter (“A Remarkable Mother”).
Then, at the age of 90, he pumped out another memoir: “A Full Life.”
The books were not just creative outlets. He came to rely on them as an important source of income, especially after he refused to join corporate boards or give paid private speeches — the kind of lucrative opportunities other presidents capitalized on after leaving office.
“Jimmy Carter is very proud of his writing and proud he could be productive enough to make a living at it,” said Jonathan Alter, the journalist whose 2020 book “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life” was one of the most comprehensive biographies of the former president. “He didn’t have to do what other presidents do.”
In 1981, he was 56, his political career torpedoed in what should have been its prime as economic turmoil and foreign crises dashed his hopes for a second term. Returning home to Plains, his tiny Georgia hometown, and a struggling family business, he dived into writing “Keeping Faith,” a memoir of his presidency.
Other presidents had opted to have ghostwriters and teams of researchers. He declined. But he did buy a $12,000 word processor, a primitive computer the size of a large microwave, saving his work to disks that could each hold 30 pages of writing. He stuck to a strict schedule, rising at 5:15 a.m., having a glass of grapefruit juice and then sitting down to write.
“His goal was not to defend himself,” said Steven H. Hochman, who was Carter’s sole research assistant on the book and is now the director of research for The Carter Center, “but to explain himself, to tell what happened and to set a basic story about himself.”
But as he evolved into writing about other parts of his life — his upbringing in Plains, his faith, the ups and downs of aging — his voice as a writer relaxed, his tone becoming less presidential and more approachable.
“An Hour Before Daylight,” a memoir about his childhood, was one of his most widely praised books and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2002. “It’s very restrained,” Fehrman said. “It’s very simple. It’s a book that shows and doesn’t tell.”
In it, Carter wrestles with the racial dynamics of rural Georgia and the shadow of the Civil War, which still loomed over his family and everyone around him.
“I grew up in one of the families whose people could not forget that we had been conquered, while most of our neighbors were Black people whose grandparents had been liberated in the same conflict,” Carter wrote. “Our two races, although inseparable in our daily lives, were kept apart by social custom, misinterpretation of Holy Scriptures, and the unchallenged law of the land as mandated by the United States Supreme Court.”
While other books may not have had the same literary quality or level of acclaim, they also helped showcase his intellectual stamina and the expansiveness of his interests. With the exception, perhaps, of his collection of Native American arrowheads, he probed virtually every other passion or facet of his life as a writer.
“He’s the closest we’ve had to a Renaissance man in the presidency since Thomas Jefferson,” Alter said.
When Carter decided to pursue poetry, he studied with accomplished Southern poets, digging in to understand how the form worked in an almost scientific way. “He engineered poetry,” Alter said.
Yet as someone who was often criticized for a certain emotional detachment, particularly in his writing — “honest, sincere, intelligent, dry, humorless and impersonal,” was how a critic for The New York Times Book Review summed up his post-presidential memoir — Carter saw the project as a way to open up. “He told me at one point that he only knew how to express his true feelings in poetry,” Alter said.
The result was “Always a Reckoning And Other Poems,” a collection of 47 short poems that was published in 1995. Publishers were not entirely receptive; he was offered an advance of $75,000, a significant sum for poetry but less than what presidents are often paid for books. The reviews were tepid. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times, called him a “mediocre poet.” And it left him exposed to mockery. “There was a lot of scoffing at Jimmy Carter in those years,” Alter said.
Despite that, the book sold well, and people close to Carter noticed in his poems shades of vulnerability that they had rarely seen elsewhere. He once said that even his wife, Rosalynn, was surprised by one he had written about his father:
This is a pain I mostly hide,
but ties of blood, or seed endure,
and even now I feel inside
the hunger for his outstretched hand,
a man’s embrace to take me in,
the need for just a word of praise.
But writing had also created strains in his marriage. “Everything to Gain,” which was supposed to be a co-written account of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s lives after leaving White House, caused so much friction between them that their editor had to travel to Plains to make peace.
“They each wrote their own version and they vowed they’d never work together again,” Alter said. “Both of them described it to me as one of the low points of their marriage.”
He also encountered turbulence over the title of his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” published in 2007. Alice Mayhew, the venerated nonfiction editor who worked with him on this and other books, tried to persuade him to not use the word apartheid. But he did not budge, and the book prompted a backlash from critics who saw it as incendiary and unfair to Israel. A longtime adviser resigned in protest, as did members of a community board at The Carter Center. He defended the book, but later lamented the friendships he had lost over it.
Carter also ran into the usual frustrations of writers. There were moments when editors prevailed, like when they said “The Hornet’s Nest,” his novel about the Revolutionary War, was too long. In the acknowledgments, he conceded he had to cut it back “with some pain and reluctance.” He also had to weather a minor crisis when his word processor malfunctioned, causing hours of work to vanish.
But Lynn Nesbit, who had been his literary agent since a meeting in the Oval Office, said he could be very different than many other writers. He was decisive. “He couldn’t afford to spend that much time agonizing,” she said. He also did not fret over how his work would be received.
“He already played on the biggest canvas in the world and had people knock him and criticize him,” Nesbit said. “What did he care about what a New York Times critic said?”
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