Edmund Morris - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Reading Morriss comprehensive, necessarily breathless account of Roosevelts rise is like riding a cannonball express through the Rockies, the peaks whipping past, one exceeding another in magnificence.

M ORDECAI R ICHLER

Morris has written a monumental work in every sense of the word. The result is a book of pulsating and well-written narrative, documented by well over 100 pages of minute, immaculate notes. An average reader will take a long time to read and absorb it all. But read it he will. The tale never lags, like its unique human subject.

E DWIN T ETLOW , The Christian Science Monitor

His prose is elegant and at the same time hard and lucid, and his sense of narrative flow is nearly flawless. The author recreates a sense of the scene and an immediacy of the situation that any skilled writer should envy and the most jaded reader should find a joy.

D ARDEN A. P YRON , Miami Herald

It is a big volume, but it is exciting enough to thrill any reader. Morris has an exceptional dexterity with words. This book will undoubtedly become the standard study of Roosevelts rise to power.

T HOMAS C ONWAY , The Boston Sunday Globe

To his task Morris brings imposing assets. He is scrupulous in the use of his material and notably fair-minded, [and] he can tell a very good story.

E LTING E. M ORISON , The Washington Post Book World

This highly entertaining, immensely readable book is an extraordinary portrait of a most amazing man, Theodore Roosevelt. Edmund Morris is scrupulously fair. He is not judgmental; he draws no sweeping conclusions. Sympathetic, amused, and understanding, he is neither adoring nor worshipful.

C AREY M C W ILLIAMS , Chicago Sun-Times

Theodore Roosevelt is one of those figures who cannot be fully calibrated without the distance of history and the views of an outsider. This towering biography is the first to answer both requisites. Orchestrating his material with a certainty and lightness of touch, Morris shuns facile psychohistory and lets Roosevelts life build its own edifice.

E DWIN W ARNER , Time

If you want a classic Teddy biography, one that hews close to the Theodore Roosevelt of patriotic legend, this entertaining and colorful book is for you. TR would have enjoyed this version of his life, not only because its exciting, particularly the cowboy tales, but because its morally correct. In no other Roosevelt biography do we get a more lively and lifelike picture of the pre-presidential Roosevelt.

N ICHOLAS VON H OFFMAN , Chicago Tribune

A huge book, but one that is so full of action that the reader will have difficulty putting it down. A monumental piece of writing one of the most interesting biographies to appear in many a moon.

J AMES H. J ESSE , The Nashville Banner

The documentation is almost overwhelming and the description of both events and personalities is unusually detailed and complete. Morris reveals the developing personality, the complex and often contradictory character, and the multiplicity of associations of this most ubiquitous of statesmen. His political career, literary activity, life as a rancher and soldier, and personal life are all abundantly covered. This may well become the definitive life.

R ALPH A DAMS B ROWN , Library Journal

If a novelist were to create a character as multidimensional as Theodore Roosevelt, his credibility would be severely strained. One cannot finish Edmund Morriss sympathetic study of the 26th Presidents early years without feeling that if TR isnt one of our historys greatest men, he is surely one of the more fascinating ones.

R ICHARD S AMUEL W EST , The Philadelphia Inquirer

Morris has crafted a magnificent biography, carefully researched and gracefully written. He has a keen eye for just the right quotation to enliven an incident or bring a personality to life, and his own sense of humor sparkles through.

A LLEN J. S HARE , Louisville Courier-Journal

Morris faces all the problems and contradictions. If he were less sympathetic than he is, his treatment of these aspects might make for distortion, but as it is, it only makes for fuller understanding.

He is also, I must not fail to restate, a magnificent writer. You can read this book with the absorption with which you would read a great novel. So great is Morriss skill that the reader follows the story as breathlessly as if he did not already know the outcome.

E DWARD W AGENKNECHT , Waltham-Newton News-Tribune

Readers of this first volume of a biography that takes Roosevelt to his first White House term will get some of the feeling of having received a series of doses of electric voltage.

H ARRY S TEINBERG , Newsday

This volume leaves us on Sept. 2, 1901. President McKinley has been shot. America would move into the 20th century with an activist President at its helm, a man who would set the pace of a strong, involved federal government. Morris is now writing that part of the story, and its publication is an event to anticipate eagerly.

M AURICE D OLBIER , Providence Sunday Journal

This irresistible biography is a lot more than a string of dramatic anecdotes. For example, theres the magnificent prose picture of the disastrous Western winter of 188687. Time and again, Mr. Morris seizes such relatively minor incidents and blows them up to fill the imaginative landscape of his study.

What does the total picture of Roosevelt add up to? Mr. Morriss refusal to interpret analytically pays rich dividends. We get to see the many contradictory sides of Theodore Rooseveltthe killer of big game and the passionate conservationist; the indefatigable writer of historical potboilers and the scholar who produced the definitive naval history of the War of 1812; the sentimental family man and the tub-thumping advocate of imperialismthe list could go on forever. For the time being, we can count our curiosity over them among the many reasons for looking forward to the second volume of this wonderfully absorbing biography.

C HRISTOPHER L EHMANN -H AUPT , The New York Times

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
Theodore Rex

A UTHORS N OTE

This Modern Library edition of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt does not differ substantially from the first edition published in 1979, although many passages have been recast. Important material deriving from recent Roosevelt scholarship has been added to the text and the documentation throughout. The book has been redesigned to conform with Theodore Rex, and some illustrations have been replaced. There are no major deletions.

2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright 1979 by Edmund Morris

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.