All the Presidents' Literature

Jonathan Raban, for the Wall Street Journal, discusses the best presidential writers and what Barack Obama's memoirs say about how he'll lead.

From the story...

It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves. In the last year, Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father" (though not his later, more conventional campaign book, "The Audacity of Hope") has been discovered by the literary profession as if it were the Comstock Lode: He wrote it himself! Every sentence has its own graceful cadence! He could as easily be a novelist as a politician!

It's an uncommon coincidence. The solitary existence of the writer, recasting the world alone in a room, generally unfits him for the intensely sociable, collegial life of practical politics, just as most successful politicians would as soon turn into Trappist monks as face the daily silence and seclusion of the writer's study. There are of course exceptions: Benjamin Disraeli entered British politics as a fashionable novelist, and went on to twice become prime minister; the playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, then of the Czech Republic. But there's no particular correlation between literary ability and high political office: think of a Melville administration, or a novel by George Washington.

Yet writing has sometimes been as important an accomplishment for an American president as his skill as a general or diplomat, as when Jefferson, Madison and John Adams wrote the United States into being by lamplight, and Lincoln scribbled disconnected sentences on scraps of paper that he tucked for safe-keeping inside his hat.



Also, NPR is touting Obama's force in book publishing. That is, what Barack Obama reads suddenly becomes a bestseller.



Also, Obama and Spider-Man are teaming up. You heard right - Spider-Man.