When we think of books and presidents, we tend to think of books about, not by, our commanders in chief. Some books have been influential in shaping our views of individual presidents or of the presidency itself. Some have added to the luster of certain chief executives. Some have tarnished their reputations. We seldom think of presidents as authors themselves — for good reason. Few presidents have thought much about books beyond their politics, and fewer still have written books disconnected from their political lives. Nowadays, when we think of a president's book, it is almost invariably a ghostwritten post-presidential memoir designed to set the record straight — and make some money.
This wasn't always the case. Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) wasn't composed with his career in mind. It was a typical expression of a polymath's natural curiosity. Theodore Roosevelt's Naval War of 1812 (1882) was an outgrowth of his Harvard student thesis and early interest in history. Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government (1885) was the first and arguably most important work of our only professor-president. The most elegant stylist ever to live in the White House, Abraham Lincoln, neither found the time nor seemed to think it essential to express himself in book-length form. And Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (1885) is the exception that proves the rule — written not in response to the drama of the Civil War but out of desperate financial necessity, it is nonetheless the best presidential autobiography in U.S. history.
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