Cook Blanche Wiesen - Eleanor Roosevelt

Exuberant Praise for Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1: The Early Years, 1884-1933

This book is exhilarating. With a marvelous combination of brilliant original research and deep intuition and empathy, Blanche Wiesen Cook conveys a wondrously human Eleanor Roosevelt who transcended the rigidities of her exclusive social background to re-create herself with growing boldness. Cook evokes with compelling detail the zest of Eleanors political passions and the complexity of her personal passions. Eleanor Roosevelt will be read through the ages by all seeking the role model of an authentic heroine.

Betty Friedan

An intelligent and absorbing study of this extraordinary life, which also examines the climate in which womens mental and political lives were shapedor stuntedin the early twentieth century.

Rhoda Koening, New York magazine

This book gives us not only a fascinating, clear-eyed look at a pioneering leader of the past but a friend who can lead us into the future.

Gloria Steinem

Ive been waiting all my life for this book. At last we have a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt that frees her from all the rumors, stereotypes, prejudices, and distortions to reveal the truths that no one before Blanche Wiesen Cook seemed able to find, let alone to tell.

Carolyn Heilbrun

In showing ER as a strong, confident, independent woman, [Cook] is bucking not merely sexist caricatures but also the reflexive self-deprecation of ERs own autobiographical writings. The facts are on Cooks side.

David Gates, Newsweek

Every woman in politics or interested in public life will want to read this book. Blanche Wiesen Cooks Eleanor Roosevelt is bold and searching, a woman of struggle, action, and achievement. Every issue, every battle and controversy she facedboth public and privatecontinues today.

Bella Abzug

The first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cooks biography arrives not a moment too soon. Her research is rich. [It] gives the extraordinary First Lady flesh.

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Impassioned and sensitive, tender and angry A fresh interpretation of the relationship between Roosevelts private and public selves Spirited and absorbing.

David M. Kennedy, front page, The New York Times Book Review

American political history at its best, Blanche Wiesen Cooks Eleanor Roosevelt fractures comfortable stereotypes, presenting a radically new Eleanoran independent political actor, nationally renowned years before she was a presidents wife; a desired and desiring woman.

Carrol Smith-Rosenberg

Quite simply the best biography Ive read in years. It offers the luxurious venues of high society, the anatomy of a celebrated marriage, history without pain, and, best of all, the character of Eleanor, arguably the most important woman in our political past.

Erica Abeel, New Woman

This book should completely change historical interpretations of the life and times of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Mary Frances Berry

Historian Cook bring[s] Eleanor entirely alive, with tender insight and a novelists skill. Had history always been written with such intelligence, charm, and understanding, wed know a lot more about the past.

Louise Berkinow, Cosmopolitan

This highly readable, well-researched work of feminist scholarship presents Eleanor Roosevelt as a strong, ever-evolving individual who overcame an emotionally impoverished childhood to become a champion of social justice. Outstanding.

Publishers Weekly

All students of Eleanor Roosevelt and her place in history will benefit from the careful and thoughtful treatment that Cook provides of the most important American woman of this century.

Lewis L. Gould, New York Newsday

A provocative, engrossing biography that contributes significantly to our knowledge of this remarkable woman.

Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor

A detailed, knowledgeable account of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The New Yorker

The career of Eleanor Roosevelt reminds us that common decency was once the ruling principle for a very special life in politics. The special virtue of Blanche Wiesen Cooks vivid biography is that it brings that life to life in such engaging and human terms.

James Mellow

AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTABLE BOOK

PENGUIN BOOKS

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, VOLUME 1: THE EARLY YEARS, 1884-1933

Historian and journalist, Blanche Wiesen Cook is professor of History and Womens Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution and The Declassified Eisenhower, in addition to her celebrated bestselling three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1993

Copyright Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1992
All rights reserved

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Pages : UPI/Bettmann. All other photographs courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Cook, Blanche Wiesen.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One 18841933 / Blanche Wiesen Cook.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
EISBN: 978-1-101-56746-3
1. Roosevelt, Eleanor, 18841962. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesWivesBiography. I. Title.
E807.1.R48C66 1992
973.917092dc20
[B] 87-40632

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Cover design: Brianna Harden