Best Presidential Biographies?

by JonnyFoy

Presidential Historians: Apart from Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson tomes, what are the really top shelf presidential biographies? I loved Caro's books but am so daunted by the vast amount of literature on other presidents out there, and I only want to read the best of the best a la Caro.

freedmenspatrol

There are a lot of presidential biographies out there for most of the popular ones. They aren't really my thing -second and third-tier pols are more my thing- but this is what I see in the footnotes and recommended by scholars around my field:

Lincoln probably has more books written about him than anybody this side of Washington, as presidents go, which makes it especially hard to sort through them. Many books discuss Lincoln in a particular period of his life or in the context of a subject. Eric Foner does that with his views on slavery in The Fiery Trial, which is really good but not a life as such. David Donald's and Michael Burlinghame's Lincoln biographies are birth to death narratives and are regarded as top notch. Burlinghame's is two volumes.

Robert Remini's three volume Jackson biography is in the footnotes just about any time the man comes up. He's is thoroughly in the tank with Jackson, which doesn't always make for the best history. Remini's discussion of the Jackson coalition and the Nullification Crisis are at best controversial, both seeking to minimize the significance of slavery when we have documents telling us in as many words that southern enslavers are a critical constituency assiduously sought. But you're not going to beat three volumes for scope and detail. Even historians hostile to Jackson cite him often because you just can't get around it.

On the more consequential but obscure front, Charles Sellers' two volumes on Polk: James K. Polk, Jacksonian, 1795-1843 and James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846 are pretty old and end just when things get really interesting but they're still most of what I see cited. I don't expect we'll see a third volume that takes things to Polk's death. A more recent and partial corrective to Sellers is Dusinberre's Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk, which argues that Sellers undersells the importance of slavery in understanding Polk.

And consequential and really, really obscure, the only biography of Franklin Pierce I ever see in the footnotes is Roy Nichols' Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills. To give you an idea, Nichols published it in 1931.

petite-acorn

I can speak to some 19th century biographies that I've enjoyed, and have some decent peer reviews. Although Doris Kearns Goodwin's 'Team of Rivals' is more of an examination of Lincoln's conduct before and during the American Civil War, along with a deep-dive into the working of Lincoln's cabinet, there is a lot of great biographical information in there. If you're looking for a good Lincoln biography, you might start there, then branch off into more specific works after examining Goodwin's sources.

'American Ulysses' by Ronald C. White is a more standard, straightforward biography, and is a decent distillation of Grant from childhood through the Civil War, presidency, and later life/death. If you're looking for a more focused biography on Grant during the war, with some personal background before it, I couldn't recommend Bruce Catton's 2-part series on Grant any more. 'Grant Moves South' and 'Grant Takes Command' are both excellent, and very easy reads.

Lastly, I can vouch for Edmund Morris' Roosevelt biographies ('The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt' & 'Theodore Rex') as being very good reads, and fairly well respected. As a writer, Morris is just that: a writer, not a historian. But he's done good work, and his first Roosevelt book won the Pulitzer, so there's that.

I hope that helps!!