Theodore Roosevelt had strong opinions about almost everything. Books were no exception.
When he left the White House in 1909 for a year-long hunting expedition in Africa, he brought along a custom case of books he called the “Pigskin Library.” Most of the books were bound in pigskin, which held up better than cloth against, as Roosevelt put it, “blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes.”
He later published the full list, then immediately told readers not to take it too seriously. He insisted more than once that “there is no such thing as a list of the hundred best books.” He loved those volumes neither more nor less, he said, than the ones he left at home.
And yet, through his autobiography, his essays, and his letters to his children, Roosevelt left behind a remarkably detailed picture of the books he returned to again and again throughout his life. Here are 12 of them, curated by folks at Mental Floss, in Roosevelt’s own words.
Sir Walter Scott — Guy Mannering and The Antiquary
Scott topped Roosevelt’s list of novelists he reread year after year. “I read over and over again ‘Guy Mannering,’ ‘The Antiquary,'” he wrote in a 1915 essay. His 1913 autobiography made the same point. Five Scott novels made the trip to Africa.
Thomas Babington Macaulay — History of England, Critical and Historical Essays, and Poems
When Harvard’s former president Charles W. Eliot put together his famous “Five-Foot Shelf” of essential books, Roosevelt was annoyed. He complained that Macaulay, like Scott, was “practically omitted,” and called them “the two nineteenth-century authors that I should most regret to lose.” All three Macaulay titles went to Africa.
William Makepeace Thackeray — Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Vanity Fair
In 1906, Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit from the White House: “I am so glad you like Thackeray. ‘Pendennis’ and ‘The Newcomes’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ I can read over and over again.” Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, though, he found heavy going.
Charles Dickens — The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend
Roosevelt’s feelings about Dickens were complicated. In February 1908 he told Kermit he was “very fond of him.” Six days later, in another letter, he called Dickens “an ill-natured, selfish cad and boor, who had no understanding of what the word gentleman meant.” The books survived the verdict on the man. He reread both and packed them for Africa.
William Shakespeare — Macbeth
“I happen to be devoted to Macbeth,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, “whereas I very seldom read Hamlet (though I like parts of it).” He also reread Othello, but not King Lear.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — “The Saga of King Olaf”
As a boy, Roosevelt read Longfellow’s cycle of poems about a Norwegian king, which he said “absorbed me” and sparked a lifelong interest in Scandinavian literature. As an adult, he listed nine Longfellow poems by name and wrote, “I am exceedingly fond of these, and of many, many other poems of Longfellow.”
Henryk Sienkiewicz — With Fire and Sword
The Polish novelist’s most famous book, Quo Vadis, was one Roosevelt said he “cannot stand.” But Sienkiewicz’s historical trilogy was another matter entirely. He wrote that he would “never tire of” With Fire and Sword, Pan Michael, and The Deluge.
Louisa May Alcott — Little Women
Roosevelt admitted in his autobiography that as a boy he “worshiped” Little Men, Little Women, and An Old-Fashioned Girl. He read them alongside Our Young Folks, a children’s magazine he called “the very best magazine in the world” — a view he said he had kept “to this day unchanged.”
Owen Wister — Western Fiction
For the West he had ranched in during the 1880s, Roosevelt turned to the author of The Virginian. “To me Owen Wister is the writer I wish when I am hungry with the memories of lonely mountains, of vast sunny plains with seas of wind-rippled grass,” he wrote.
Algernon Charles Swinburne — Poetry
An English poet known for lush, ornate verse might seem out of place in the Dakota Badlands. Roosevelt explained it well: “When I lived much in cow camps I often carried a volume of Swinburne, as a kind of antiseptic to alkali dust, tepid, muddy water, frying-pan bread, sow-belly bacon, and the too-infrequent washing of sweat-drenched clothing.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes — The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
Roosevelt called Holmes “the laughing philosopher, the humorist at his very highest.” He took both The Autocrat and its follow-up, Over the Teacups, to Africa. When Eliot left The Autocrat off his Five-Foot Shelf, Roosevelt called it “an incomprehensible choice from my standpoint.”
Emily Eden — The Semi-Attached Couple
The most obscure title on the list is a “little pre-Victorian novel or tale” that Roosevelt kept on the shelves at his home, Sagamore Hill. “It is told with much humor; it is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk; and to me it is altogether delightful,” he wrote.
Not every classic earned that kind of praise. Of Jane Austen, he wrote that finishing one of her books gave him the feeling that “duty performed is a rainbow to the soul.”
High praise for some. Faint praise for others. But always, always, an opinion.
