The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President's Books [Hardcover]

Jimmy Carter's expansive body of writing ranges across the genres of memoir, commentary, children's literature, poetry, and a novel about the Revolutionary War. Editors Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard have assembled a group of award-winning journalists, poets, historians, and literary scholars to reflect on this substantial  and to some, unexpected  dimension of Carter's legacy. Collectively, these essays, including several by the editors themselves, document a through-line of ethical integrity, perspective, and insight that runs through Carter's writing  from his controversial trilogy on peace in the Middle East to his personal reflections on his Georgia boyhood. Carter never used a ghost writer. As a result, his distinct voice and point of view comes through in every book that he published.The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter brings together original essays about the thirty-two books that President Jimmy Carter wrote over the course of his life. Since Carter wrote most of these books after completing his term as president, this collection sheds light on Carter's remarkable post-presidency years.

Mark I. Westis a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1984. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, includingTheodore Roosevelt on Books and Reading(2023) andTheodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill(2022).
Frye Gaillard,former writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, is a journalist-historian who has written more than 30 books. His award-winning titles includeA Hard Rain: America in the 1960s(an NPR best book of 2018);Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America; andProphet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy.

A huge thank you to the essayists who have curated Carter's extraordinary body of work in this tribute to a literary life that began with his first campaign memoir,Why Not the Best?.