The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Summary

Edmund Morris’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography *The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt* chronicles the first forty-two years of Roosevelt’s life, from his birth in 1858 in a Manhattan brownstone to his sudden accession to the presidency in 1901. The book is the first volume of Morris’s acclaimed trilogy, followed by *Theodore Rex* and *Colonel Roosevelt*. Morris organizes the narrative around Roosevelt’s restless self-transformation: the frail, asthmatic boy who builds his body through boxing and weightlifting, the young naturalist who publishes a serious study of birds, and the Harvard student who rejects a comfortable patrician path for a life of strenuous exertion. The biography follows TR through his early political career as a reformist New York assemblyman, his grief-stricken years as a Dakota Badlands rancher after the deaths of his mother and first wife, Alice, on the same day in 1884, and his return to public life as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, and assistant secretary of the Navy. Morris gives sustained attention to the Spanish-American War, where Roosevelt’s leadership of the Rough Riders at the battles of Kettle Hill and San Juan Heights made him a national celebrity, and to his subsequent election as governor of New York and nomination as vice president under William McKinley. A distinctive thread is Morris’s emphasis on Roosevelt’s drive to impose order on chaos—whether in nature, politics, or his own turbulent emotions—and on the sheer velocity of his life, which Morris captures through meticulous archival research and vivid scene-setting. The book ends with McKinley’s assassination and Roosevelt’s swearing-in, positioning him at the threshold of the presidency.