Joseph P. Lash – författare

Joseph P. Lash, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and National Book Award-winning writer of Eleanor and Franklin, turns to the seventeen years Eleanor Roosevelt lived after FDR's death in 1945. Already a major figure in her own right, Roosevelt gained new stature with her work at the United Nations and her contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She continued her activism on behalf of civil rights, as well as her humanitarian work, which led President Harry Truman to call her the First Lady of the World. Lash has created an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary person.

The author combines research and excerpts from Hyde Park papers to illuminate the forty-five-year marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

These diaries present fragments from a remarkable life: the immigrant boy who became a counselor to presidents and a shaping force in the evolution of our Constitution into a twentieth-century instrument. As Henry L. Stimson noted, Felix Frankfurter had a talent “for keeping in touch with the center of things.” The life of his times at the level of decision and policy, the human tensions elicited by the possession of power pulse through the pages of his diaries. There are fascinating glimpses, from the inside, of the Taft administration, of Roosevelt’s Washington during World War II, and of the early years of the Truman presidency.

In his extraordinary biography of the major political couple of the twentieth century, Joseph P. Lash reconstructs from Eleanor Roosevelt's personal papers her early life and four-decade marriage to the four-time president who brought America back from the Great Depression and helped to win World War II. The result is an intimate look at the vibrant private and public worlds of two incomparable people.