Former U.S. president, 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and prolific author Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at his home in Plains, Ga., after nearly two years in hospice care and the loss of his wife, Rosalynn, last November. At 100, he was the longest-lived president in American history.
Carter once described himself as "a farmer, a naval officer, a Sunday school teacher, an outdoorsman, a builder, and a governor of Georgia." Add to that a list of notable achievements in the book world: he was the author of 32 books, ranging in subject from politics and foreign affairs to faith and Scripture and including a coffee-table book on his woodworking hobby, replete with photos of furniture he had built, and a children's book.
"Of all our modern presidents, Jimmy Carter was America’s most protean author," Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, told PW. (S&S has published 13 of Carter’s titles, all bestsellers, since 2001.) "President Carter wrote memoirs, calls to action, fiction, poetry, and children’s books," Karp continued. "He wrote appreciations of Scripture and nature. He offered advice on how to live a meaningful life. He delighted in reading the audiobook versions of his work, for which he won three Grammy awards. In all of his books, he maintained a voice of great integrity and intellectual honesty. We are grateful to have published so many books by President Carter, books that will endure as a legacy for readers who want to appreciate the life and mind of one of the most inspiring and admirable world leaders of our time.”
Carter was a Southern Baptist evangelical with the mind of an engineer whose meteoric political rise to the presidency in 1976 turned into a one-term rollercoaster. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown, 2021), called Carter "a quiet force of nature." Bird tallied his accomplishments, including the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II arms control agreement, centering human rights in U.S. foreign policy, deregulating the airline industry and natural gas, and investing in solar energy; plus, "he rammed through the Alaska Land Act, tripling the size of the nation’s protected wilderness areas." A bad economy and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran cost him reelection in 1980.
At the American Booksellers Association conference in 1982, Carter, invited to talk about his post-White House book, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, began by joking that he had intended to be there talking about his memoirs in 1986 rather than 1982, according to PW. He told a sold-out ballroom crowd his book addressed the Camp David talks, the Iran hostage situation ("The worst year of my life"), and the agony of his rejection by the voters. Carter said, "I've really put my heart into this book and I didn't want to waste 16 months of my life on a book only a few people would read."
He was out of elective office, but the story of Carter's lifetime of accomplishment had another four decades to go. The New York Times tallied his post-presidency as "a series of philanthropic causes around the world, like building houses for the poor, combating Guinea worm, promoting human rights in places of repression, monitoring elections and seeking to end conflicts His work as a former president in many ways came to eclipse his time in the White House, eventually earning him the (2002) Nobel Peace Prize and rehabilitating his image in the eyes of many Americans." On his 99th birthday last October, best wishes came from more than 100 countries, his grandson, Jason Carter, chairman of the Carter Center, told the Times.
Carter never shied from controversy. In Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, (S&S, 2005) Carter addressed "preemptive war, women's rights, terrorism, civil liberties, homosexuality, abortion, the death penalty, science and religion, environmental degradation, nuclear arsenals, America's global image, fundamentalism, and the melding of religion and politics," in what the publisher called "a passionate defense of separation of church and state."
Agent Lynn Nesbit, who worked with him on titles from the time he left the presidency, said that "he wrote every word himself. Don't think he didn't. He enjoyed the process very much. He was very organized, very efficient." And very stubborn—Carter defied Nesbit and S&S editor Alice Mayhew when he insisted that his 2006 look at the Middle East carry an incendiary title: Palestine, Peace not Apartheid. "Apartheid was a trigger word," Nesbit recalls. The backlash over his appearing to associate Israel with South Africa's system of racial segregation was so fierce that few looked inside to read his mainstream call for a two-state solution, said Jonathan Alter, author of the Carter biography, His Very Best (S&S, 2020). He said that Carter told him years after the book came out that the title was a mistake, and that he intended it to signal a future danger for Israel.
"He had no regrets about any other book. He liked stirring the hornet's nest," said Alter. Carter even named his only novel, set in the Revolutionary War, The Hornet's Nest (S&S, 2003). Even so, Alter said, Carter "sugarcoated some of the harsh racial realities" in An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (S&S, 2001). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the book is "a very tender portrait of growing up on a farm in the 1920s and '30s, but it's not the definitive source on his early life," said Alter. Carter revisited those years with a sharper eye in another memoir, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (S&S, 2005), for which the audio version also won a Grammy.
Carter was also astute about the marketplace, Alter said. He knew, contrary to conventional wisdom, that not only evangelical Christians bought books about religion, that there was "a larger market of liberal people of faith than people realize. His books appeal to people of faith across the board. His faith is so genuine, he knows Scripture so well. He knows how to communicate ideas, sometimes complex theological ideas in clear simple prose," Alter said, pointing to numerous Carter books on faith and society. And he communicated not only on the page but in narrating a Grammy-winning series of audiobooks drawn from his Sunday morning classes at his Plains church, "Sunday Mornings in Plains." The last book he published was Faith: A Journey for All, in 2018.
These books of politics and faith may be his best-remembered titles, but there was another dimension still to the indefatigable author, said publishing veteran Peter Osnos, who worked with Carter when he was a VP, associate publisher, and senior editor at Random House. When he edited six of Carter's books in the '80s and '90s', he initially rejected one, he recalled after the news of Carter's entering hospice——a poetry collection. Carter responded to the rejection with a rhyme: “Poems editors seem to buy / Don’t make sense, lack rhyme and rhythm / If they don’t amuse or edify / What else should we do with ’em.”
Osnos then took the book, Always a Reckoning and Other Poems (Times Books/Random House 1994), offering a $75,000 advance. He later wrote, in an online column, that "the book went on the New York Times bestseller list as nonfiction and stayed there for two months." The column concludes: "Poetry may not be one of his greatest legacies, but his commitment to honorable goals, which was so much of his character, was in that book."
