President Theodore Roosevelt had a passion for reading books, and he did not keep this passion to himself. He often wrote about his experiences as a reader and collector of books. He wrote scholarly essays about literature and literary history. He often wrote book reviews for such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Bookman, The Outlook, and The New York Times Review of Books. Roosevelt’s writings about books are worth reading for their own sake, for in these pieces he provided critical insights into influential books. His writings about books, however, are also important because they show how Roosevelt responded to the books that he read. Roosevelt’s reading influenced his thinking on the many topics that interested him, so these writings provide researchers with a better understanding of the role that books played in the formation of his ideas, attitudes, and political positions. Theodore Roosevelt on Books and Reading brings together for the first time Roosevelt’s writings about his experiences as a reader, his scholarly essays about literature and literary history, and his exuberant reviews of some of the books that he especially liked. A sister volume to Mark I. West’s Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill, this new volume features Roosevelt’s own responses to many of the books in his personal library. All of the selections in this volume reflect Roosevelt’s passion for reading. These selections will resonate with anyone who shares Roosevelt’s love of books.

From the renowned author of Invisible Man, a classic, “elegant” (The New York Times) collection of essays that captures the breadth and complexity of his insights into racial identity, jazz and folklore, and citizenship across six decades. Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this definitive volume includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that Black Americans lead. With newly discovered essays and speeches, The Collected Essays reveals a more vulnerable, intimate side of Ellison than what we've previously seen. “Raph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”