Based on ten years of study and reporting, Author in Chief tells the storyplot of America’s presidents as authors—and offers a surprising fresh window into 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..READING MORE about Author in Key: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in magic formula to get his publication ready for the 1860 election, searching for newspaper transcripts, editing them cautiously for fairness, and hunting for a printer who would meet his specifications. Political Debates sold fifty thousand copies—the rough equivalent of half of a million books in today’s marketplace—and it reveals something about Lincoln’s presidential ambitions. But it addittionally reveals something about his center and brain. When voters asked about his values, Lincoln liked to point these to his book.

In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking function of history, Author in Chief, the storyplot of America’s presidents and their books opens a wealthy new window into presidential biography. From amounts lost to history—Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was perhaps one of the most broadly discussed game titles of 1929—to ones we realize and like—Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was very nearly never released—Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works.

Presidential books have manufactured an enormous effect on American history, catapulting their authors towards the national stage as well as turning crucial elections. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the Condition of Virginia, the first presidential publication to impact a advertising campaign, and John Adams’s Autobiography, the 1st score-settling presiden­tial memoir, Writer in Chief draws on newly uncovered details—including never-before-published letters from Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—to ensemble fresh light over the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders.

We see Teddy Roosevelt as a vulnerable first-time author, struggling to create the book that would become a classic of American history. We discover Reagan painstakingly revising Where’s the others of Me?, a neglected memoir in which he sharpened his sunlit political image. We discover Donald Trump negotiating the deal for The Artwork of the Deal, the volume that made him synonymous with business savvy. Together with each of these authors, we also glimpse the everyday Us citizens who go through them.

Merging the narrative felicity of a journalist with the rigorous scholarship of a historian, Fehrman provides a feast for history lovers, book lovers, and everybody curious about a behind-the-scenes take a look at our presidents.