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incident or bring a personality to life, and his own sense of humor sparkles through.”
    —A LLEN J. S HARE , Louisville
Courier-Journal
    “Morris faces all the problems and contradictions.… If he were less sympathetic than he is, his treatment of these aspects might make for distortion, but as it is, it only makes for fuller understanding
.
    “He is also, I must not fail to restate, a magnificent writer. You can read this book with the absorption with which you would read a great novel.… So great is Morris’s skill that the reader follows the story as breathlessly as if he did not already know the outcome.”
    —E DWARD W AGENKNECHT , Waltham-Newton
News-Tribune
    “Readers of this first volume of a biography that takes Roosevelt to his first White House term will get some of the feeling of having received a series of doses of electric voltage.”
    —H ARRY S TEINBERG ,
Newsday
    “This volume leaves us on Sept. 2, 1901. President McKinley has been shot.… America would move into the 20th century with an activist President at its helm, a man who would set the pace of a strong, involved federal government. Morris is now writing that part of the story, and its publication is an event to anticipate eagerly.”
    —M AURICE D OLBIER , Providence
Sunday Journal
    “This irresistible biography is a lot more than a string of dramatic anecdotes. For example, there’s the magnificent prose picture of the disastrous Western winter of 1886–87.… Time and again, Mr. Morris seizes such relatively minor incidents and blows them up to fill the imaginative landscape of his study.…
    “What does the total picture of Roosevelt add up to? … Mr. Morris’s refusal to interpret analytically pays rich dividends. We get to see the many contradictory sides of Theodore Roosevelt—the killer of big game and the passionate conservationist; the indefatigable writer of historical potboilers and the scholar who produced the definitive naval history of the War of 1812; the sentimental family man and the tub-thumping advocate of imperialism—the list could go on forever.… For the time being, we can count our curiosity over them among the many reasons for looking forward to the second volume of this wonderfully absorbing biography.”
    —C HRISTOPHER L EHMANN -H AUPT ,
The New York Times

A LSO BY E DMUND M ORRIS
    Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Theodore Rex





A UTHOR’S N OTE
    This Modern Library edition of
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
does not differ substantially from the first edition published in 1979, although many passages have been recast. Important material deriving from recent Roosevelt scholarship has been added to the text and the documentation throughout. The book has been redesigned to conform with
Theodore Rex
, and some illustrations have been replaced. There are no major deletions.
    2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition
    Copyright © 1979 by Edmund Morris
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    M ODERN L IBRARY and the T ORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
    This work was originally published, in slightly different form, by Coward, McCann
&
Geoghegan in 1979.
    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA
    Morris, Edmund.
The rise of Theodore Roosevelt / Edmund Morris.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Coward, McCann
&
Geoghegan,
© 1979.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77782-9
1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1901–1909. 4. New York (State)—Politics and government—1865–1950. I. Title.
    E757 .M883 2001
973.91′1′092—dc21
    [B]     2001030520
    Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
    v3.1

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