Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote Audiobook (Free)

Based on a decade of research and reporting, Author in Chief tells the story of America’s presidents as authors—and offers a surprising new window in to the public and private lives of our highest leaders.

Most Americans are familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s popular words in the Gettysburg Address and the Eman­cipation Proclamation. Yet few can name the task that helped him earn the presidency: his released collection of speeches entitled Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon..LEARNING MUCH MORE about Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in magic formula to get his book prepared for the 1860 election, searching for paper transcripts, editing them thoroughly for fairness, and trying to find a printer who would meet his specifications. Political Debates marketed fifty thousand copies—the rough equivalent of half a million books in today’s marketplace—and it reveals something about Lincoln’s presidential ambitions. But it also reveals something about his center and brain. When voters asked about his beliefs, Lincoln loved to point these to his book.

In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a wealthy brand-new window into presidential biography. From quantities lost to background—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, that was one of the most broadly discussed game titles of 1929—to types we realize and like—Barack Obama’s Dreams from MY DAD, which was very nearly never released—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary functions.

Presidential books have built an enormous impact on American history, catapulting their authors towards the nationwide stage and even turning essential elections. You start with Thomas Jefferson’s Records on the State of Virginia, the 1st presidential publication to impact a marketing campaign, and John Adams’s Autobiography, the first score-settling presiden­tial memoir, Author in Chief pulls on newly uncovered information—including never-before-published words from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to solid fresh light around the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders.

We see Teddy Roosevelt like a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to write the book that would become a basic of American history. We find Reagan painstakingly revising Where’s the Rest of Me?, a neglected memoir in which he sharpened his sunny political picture. We see Donald Trump negotiating the offer for The Art of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Together with each one of these writers, we also glance the everyday People in america who go through them.

Combining the narrative felicity of a journalist using the rigorous scholarship of a historian, Fehrman delivers a feast for history lovers, book lovers, and everybody interested in a behind-the-scenes take a look at our presidents.