A Most Glorious Ride: The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877-1886

Encompasses key years and important events in Theodore Roosevelt's early life and career.

Finalist for the 2015 ForeWord INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in the History Category

A Most Glorious Ride presents the complete diaries of Theodore Roosevelt from 1877 to 1886. Covering the formative years of his life, Roosevelt's entries show the transformation of a sickly and solitary Harvard freshman into a confident and increasingly robust young adult. He writes about his grief over the premature death of his father, his courtship and marriage to his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and later the death of Alice and his mother on the same day. The diaries chronicle his burgeoning political career in New York City and his election to the New York State Assembly. With his descriptions of balls, dinner parties, and nights at the opera, they offer a glimpse into life among the Gilded Age elite in Boston and New York. They also recount Roosevelt's first birding and hunting trips to the Adirondacks, the Maine woods, and the American West. Ending with Roosevelt's secret engagement to his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, A Most Glorious Ride provides an intimate look into the life of the man who would become America's twenty-sixth president.

Brought together for the first time in a single volume, the diaries have been meticulously transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Edward P. Kohn. Twenty-four black-and-white photographs are also included.

Edward P. Kohn is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Turkey. Kohn has written extensively on Theodore Roosevelt, and his previous books include Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt and Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt.