Of all our U.S. presidents, Theodore Roosevelt hands down wins the title of “Most Voracious Reader.”
A skilled speed-reader, he frequently consumed a book before breakfast and ingested one or two more in the evenings. By his own estimate, this reader of libraries had made his way through tens of thousands of books, including several hundred in foreign languages.
Books being written about Theodore Roosevelt's love for books.
This reading immensely broadened his horizons and helped make him the man he was. Here is a list—a very short list—of some books that influenced him and the course of his nation.
Boyhood Books
From early childhood, Roosevelt displayed an intense interest in natural history. In “Mornings on Horseback,” biographer David McCullough describes this fascination, noting that Roosevelt in his youth was familiar with “the works of Audubon and those of Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost American naturalist of the day.”One popular writer, much admired at the time by Roosevelt, was Thomas Mayne Reid, author of such adventures as “The Boy Hunters” and “The Scalp Hunters,” which McCullough describes as “rollicking adventures, full of action, violence, and grand-scale visions of the outdoors.”
From books such as these, Roosevelt gained a deep appreciation for nature and the American West and for manly adventures. Later, these early influences may have guided his decision to try his hand at ranching in the Dakotas and in forming the Rough Riders for the Spanish-American War. One claim to fame as president was Roosevelt’s promotion of a national parks system, again reflective of books read in his boyhood.
More Adventures
In his autobiography, Roosevelt gave high praise to a magazine of his youth, “Our Young Folks,” calling it “the very best magazine in the world” and having copies bound for his own children. He mentioned specific stories, including those aimed at girls, which, “at the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls’ stories … just as I worshipped ‘Little Men’ and ‘Little Women’ and ‘An Old-Fashioned Girl.’”
Cover of Our Young Folks magazine from 1865. Public Domain
Roosevelt also specifically complimented Frederick Marryat’s “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” a seagoing novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, as an admired tale of adventure. Perhaps stories like this one helped rouse his interest in the oceans and naval warfare.
‘The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783’
The 2011 release of Mahan's influential text on naval power.
Roosevelt was a writer as well as a reader. The first of his more than 30 books was his 1882 book “The Naval War of 1812.” Though historians debate what influenced this early interest in sea power, most agree that Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” profoundly affected his thinking. Using Great Britain as his model, Mahan contended that a strong Navy was essential to a nation’s political and economic well-being. Published in 1890, Mahan’s book was read and favorably reviewed by Roosevelt.
As assistant secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley, Roosevelt in 1897 initiated a major effort to build up and modernize the navy. His efforts paid off during the Spanish-American War just a year later. During his own presidency, still under the influence of Mahan’s treatise, he continued to strengthen America’s presence on the high seas.
Classics
A sampling of translations and editions of the “Iliad” in English. Pete Unseth/ CC BY-SA 4.0
In 1909, after stepping down from the presidency, Roosevelt set out on a year-long expedition to Africa. With him he took his “pigskin library,” a gift from his sister Colleen of 60 books bound in pigskin to offer some protection against the wear-and-tear of his safari. Among these were Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers,” novels by Sir Walter Scott, the plays of Shakespeare, and collections of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Tennyson, and others.
These choices reveal two principles behind Roosevelt’s reading: that he often reread great literature and that getaways were the perfect time for delving deep into more demanding texts.
A friend asking for recommendations of books for reading received a long list from Roosevelt. Here, too, are writers still read today, like Thucydides, Tolstoy, and Thackeray. Yet Roosevelt also included authors and their books less familiar to us today, like Charles Wagner’s “The Simple Life,” Stewart Edward White’s “The Blazed Trail,” and Owen Wister’s “Philosophy 4.”
Advice from a World Champion Reader
Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill house in Oyster Bay, New York has 3,600 books he personally owned. Thousands more are located at Long Island University and Harvard’s Widener Library. These collections reveal a man with eclectic tastes and enamored with the printed word. “A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open” underlines the breadth of these literary interests, as does this passage from his “Autobiography:”“Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels. I don’t mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written.”
The Reading Room at the Widener Library at Harvard University. Public Domain
That’s as solid a suggestion as any on books and reading—and not just for politicians, but for the rest of us as well.
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