Excerpt from From Tent to White House: Or How a Poor Boy Became President Surveying the whole list of our Presidents, it is impossible to find a more perfect type of American manhood than William McKinley. Born in a little cottage in a small town in Ohio, feeling the pressure of hard times, if not the pinch of poverty, the sturdy boy, endowed by nature and birth with a stout heart and a wise head, worked his way upward inch by inch until by grit he reached the top, and from the uppermost round of the ladder stepped into the sky. We are yet too near to the third of our martyred Presidents to be able to estimate him at his full value, or to give him his rightful place among the worlds leaders; but in the years to come it is certain that the name of William McKinley will shine far up among the greatest names in history. His life was not a meteoric flash, but a star, clear shining and constant - a white radiance that never grew dim. Strength of manhood, consistency of life, beauty of soul, splendid honesty of administration, and a wise vision that almost amounted to foreknowledge - these were the things that raised him head and shoulders above his fellows and made him great. It is strange that such a man as this should be singled out as the victim of a traitorous Anarchist; strange, indeed, that so horrible a crime should be possible in these days of enlightenment. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Presidents of American Fiction brings together American literature, history, and political science to explore the most influential fictionalized accounts of the presidency from the early 19th century to the time of Trump. Of late, popular understandings of the presidency are being radically re-written-consider, for example, the distinctive myths that accompanied the ascent of the Obama and Trump administrations-and many readers of all stripes are radically reimagining the office and its holder. Placing these changes within a broader cultural context, Michael J. Blouin investigates narratives involving fictional presidents, from the supposedly factual to the outright fantastical, within their distinct literary and historical moments. The author considers representative texts including works penned by James Fenimore Cooper from the Jacksonian moment, Gore Vidal in the age of Nixon and Vietnam, and Philip Roth in the neoliberal period. Through detailed readings that question how American presidents function as characters within the popular imagination, this book examines the presidency as a complex, ever-evolving trope, and in so doing enhances our appreciation of American literature's inextricable link with American politics.

A New Yorker staff writer examines the origins of dozens of writings, speeches and other printed pieces from American history--from paper ballots and I.O.U.s to the Constitution and Thomas Paine's Common Sense to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.