winning plus In His Reading Life, Jimmy Carter Favored ‘Anything but Politics’

When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was new to the national scene. Of the many questions reporters asked to fill in the picture of the manwinning plus, one was almost impossible for him to answer: his favorite book. A voracious speed reader, proficient in Spanish, with a vast and eclectic taste in literature, he had taken hundreds of authors to heart. Forced to decide, Carter chose James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941), which documented the depredations that Southern sharecroppers suffered in the Great Depression.

“Agee’s style of writing was sobering,” President Carter told me one afternoon in Plains, Ga., in 1993. “I admired his autobiographical novel ‘A Death in the Family,’ and his book ‘Letters of James Agee to Father Flye’ was beautiful. But the press wanted one, not three, so I chose ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ His vivid description of the kind of family life that I knew — at least among our neighbors in Plains in my early and formative years — was hauntingly spot on.”

In 1993, when I was writing a biography of Carter — what became “The Unfinished Presidency” — we engaged in a long conversation about books that mattered to him. His omnipresent recall of minute detail from the Bible to Toni Morrison was on full display. Encyclopedic on all aspects of Georgia history and literature, he at one point launched into a vigorous defense of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. “I’m pleased that Black writers like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray took Uncle Remus stories seriously,” he said. “They forgave Harris’s sins of cultural appropriation of the vernacular because it’s a central part of all Southern dialects. You can’t be a Southerner — Black or white — and not know who Tar Baby, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox are.”

That’s far lower than the apex, in 2019, when more than 27 percent of high school students who took the survey reported that they vaped — and an estimated 500,000 fewer adolescents than last year.

In 2000, Mr. Silberman, who was then a contributing editor at Wired magazine, knew little about autism beyond Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Raymond Babbitt, a man with the condition, in the 1988 film “Rain Man.”

When Carter had entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis during World War II, there was a national debate over who was a greater Southern writer, William Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell. Deriding Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” as vulgar sex-peddling and “an insult to the South,” he touted Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930) as a far superior work of fiction. “Faulkner gave an intriguing picture of Southern small-town life and interrelationships among white people,” Carter told me. “He would bring in Negro characters on occasion, but he mainly showed the historical white family existence based on pride on having fought in the Civil War and coming home.” Carter was enthralled by Faulkner’s novella “Spotted Horses.” “I’d read that story aloud to my three sons,” he said. “Flem Snopes — a character who sold untamed ponies to foolish buyers — reminded me of a friend in Macon.”

“After Faulkner,” the president continued, “I grew infatuated with Dylan Thomas.” Why a Welsh poet? Carter’s interest started his first year home from the Navy, when he was working in a warehouse: “In my free time, I read,” he said. “I encountered Thomas in an anthology of modern poetry. His poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ took my breath away. The last line in particular: ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ It kind of caught my eye and I read the poem over again and tried to figure out what he was saying. I diagramed Thomas’s sentences, like an engineer would with a spreadsheet, trying to figure them out. And then, later, I would read Dylan Thomas poems to my children.”

When Carter entered politics, he sought to inject Thomas’s poems into the public discourse the way John F. Kennedy had with Robert Frost’s. When he attended his first Group of 7 conference as president, in London, Prime Minister James Callaghan asked what he wanted to do for entertainment. “I said I wanted to go visit Dylan Thomas’s birthplace,” the president recalled. “The prime minister arranged for me to do that. But while I was in Westminster Abbey, I told the archbishop I wanted to see the Poets’ Corner, and when I got there I said, ‘Where is the plaque to Dylan Thomas?’ And he told me that they didn’t have one because Thomas was not the kind of person they wanted to honor. I said … ‘What does it matter, it’s the art, not anything else that counts.’”

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