The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President’s Books

Jimmy Carter’s expansive body of writing ranges across the genres of memoir, commentary, children’s literature, poetry, and a novel about the Revolutionary War. Editors Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard have assembled a group of award-winning journalists, poets, historians, and literary scholars to reflect on this substantial - and to some, unexpected - dimension of Carter’s legacy. Collectively, these essays, including several by the editors themselves, document a through-line of ethical integrity, perspective, and insight that runs through Carter’s writing - from his controversial trilogy on peace in the Middle East to his personal reflections on his Georgia boyhood. Carter never used a ghost writer. As a result, his distinct voice and point of view comes through in every book that he published.

Mark I. West is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1984. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including Theodore Roosevelt on Books and Reading (2023) and Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill (2022).

Frye Gaillard, former writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, is a journalist-historian who has written more than 30 books. His award-winning titles include A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (an NPR best book of 2018); Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America; and Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy.