Eleanor and Franklin

Eleanor and Franklin is the story of a marriage that shaped a century, told by a man who knew one of its partners as well as anyone alive. Joseph Lash met Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939, when she attended a congressional hearing to lend moral support to the young activist under questioning, and the friendship lasted until her death; afterward the family gave him access to her private papers, and he spent years in them. The book that resulted follows Eleanor from a miserable Gilded Age childhood, orphaned young and raised by a cold grandmother, through the marriage to her glamorous cousin Franklin, the discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer that broke the marriage's romantic heart while leaving its political partnership standing, the polio that put him in a wheelchair and her on the road as his eyes and ears, and the White House years in which she remade the office of First Lady into a platform for civil rights, labor, and the poor. Lash writes with the sympathy of a friend and the evidence of an archive, and the combination is devastating where it needs to be; the Mercer chapters and Eleanor's slow construction of an independent life out of private grief have the force of a novel. The book swept the honors of its year, the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the 1972 National Book Award in Biography, and the Francis Parkman Prize, became a bestseller, and produced an Emmy winning television film. Every Eleanor Roosevelt biography since starts from it.