Eleanor Roosevelt: Autobiographies & Political Writings, Vol. 1 (LOA #404)

The complete texts and more than 100 accompanying photographs of Roosevelt’s autobiographies, meticulously restored from the first editions

An unrivalled selection of her outspoken and perceptive writings on politics, democracy, citizenship, and patriotism: all essential reading for the current moment.

A tireless activist and gifted political advocate, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most inspiring, influential, and controversial American public figures of the last century. The nation’s longest serving First Lady, and the first to contribute regular columns to newspapers and magazines, she was a prolific and immensely popular writer, the author of two dozen works of autobiography and public advocacy. Her books, essays, and articles—on human rights, on the possibilities and responsibilities of democracy, on war and international cooperation, on labor and civil rights, feminism and women’s roles, education, liberalism, and the role of government—shaped the course of the twentieth century and continue to resonate in the twenty-first. Now Library of America presents a two-volume edition of her writings both on her own remarkable life and from her work as a political and social activist.

Roosevelt’s autobiographies were best sellers when they were first published, and with her newspaper columns and prolific essays and articles in magazines, were how ordinary Americans experienced Eleanor Roosevelt while she served as First Lady. Her first autobiography, This Is My Story (1937), published at the beginning of her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term as president of the United States, describes her upper-class childhood and the early deaths of her parents, her marriage and motherhood, and her husband’s entry into politics, ending in 1924 when Franklin returned to political work after his polio diagnosis. The second autobiography, This I Remember (1949), continues the story through the Depression, Franklin’s governorship of New York, and the White House years and World War II, ending with Franklin’s death in 1945. The first volumes concludes with a selection of fifteen articles written by Roosevelt from 1923 to 1944, starting with her early forays into Democratic women’s politics in the 1920s, followed by her activism during the Great Depression, early pieces on Jim Crow and civil rights, and her role in World War II.