The Rise of a Leader: A Review of “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” by Edmund Morris

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt began as a screenplay that never got made. After Richard Nixon’s televised resignation speech in 1974, Edmund Morris went to the Dakota Badlands to research a script called “Dude from New York.” A Hollywood producer optioned it, and nothing came of it. His agent suggested a short biography instead, according to an Encyclopedia.com profile of Morris, and the short biography kept growing.

Published in 1979, it won the Pulitzer Prize and became the first volume of a three-book life. It also stops earlier than many readers expect. The book ends in September 1901, the week Roosevelt becomes president, and leaves the presidency to a sequel published more than twenty years later.

The Author and the Making of the Book

Edmund Morris was born on May 27, 1940, in Nairobi, Kenya, to South African parents. He studied music, art and literature at Rhodes University in South Africa and dropped out in 1961, according to Wikipedia. After a stretch as an advertising copywriter in London he moved to the United States in 1968, the year he married the biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris, as CBS News reported at the time of his death. He died on May 24, 2019, at 78, in Danbury, Connecticut, after a stroke.

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan published The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in 1979, when Morris was 40. It sold well and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; the Pulitzer site lists Ernest Samuels, Geoffrey Wolff and Meryle Secrest as the finalists that year. It also took the National Book Award in biography, in the hardcover category.

Page counts depend on the edition. Open Library lists the 2001 Modern Library paperback at 920 pages, while a blogger who reviewed the book in 2015 counted 741. Whichever copy is in hand, it is a long book.

The sequels followed slowly. Theodore Rex (2001) covers the presidency, and Colonel Roosevelt (2010) covers the years after it. In between, Morris spent about fourteen years on Ronald Reagan. He signed a $3 million contract in 1985 and published Dutch in 1999 with an invented narrator, a choice that drew heavy criticism, per the same Wikipedia entry. Morris’s papers have since found an institutional home: in January 2024 the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library announced it had acquired the Edmund Morris archives, which fill 151 bankers’ boxes and are to be housed at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

What the Book Covers

The book starts before Roosevelt does, with the family. Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan, a sickly child with severe asthma, per Wikipedia. His father died in 1878. He entered Harvard in 1876, graduated in 1880, and that October married Alice Hathaway Lee.

From there the book follows the climb. Roosevelt serves in the New York State Assembly from 1882 to 1884, ranches in the Dakota Territory, sits on the federal Civil Service Commission, and presides over the New York City police board from 1895 to 1897. He becomes Assistant Secretary of the Navy, resigns in May 1898 as the Spanish–American War begins, and leads the charges up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill on July 1. He is governor of New York for 1899 and 1900 and vice president from March 4, 1901. The chapters on his European and African travels, as Wikipedia’s entry on the book notes, sit alongside the political ones.

The ending is built into the calendar. President McKinley was shot in Buffalo on September 6, 1901, and died on September 14. Roosevelt took the oath that day at the Ansley Wilcox House. The book’s coverage ends there, at the moment the title promises.

North Dakota Badlands at golden hour with a river and a small log ranch cabin

Loss, Work and Reinvention

The readings below are this review’s, not Morris’s. They rest on dates the book has to cover.

On February 12, 1884, Roosevelt’s daughter Alice was born. Two days later his wife, Alice Lee, died of kidney failure, and his mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, had died of typhoid fever eleven hours before her, as Wikipedia’s entry on Alice Lee Roosevelt records. Within a few years the ranch in the Dakota Territory had absorbed him, and the winter of 1886–87 wiped out his herd. He returned to New York and kept moving toward office. Lay the dates in a row and a pattern shows: each setback was followed by a move into harder, more public work.

The second thread is reading. Morris reports, per Wikipedia’s entry on the book, that Roosevelt probably read about a book a day over his lifetime, and a reviewer at My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies singled out Morris’s reading of Roosevelt’s own published writing as a way into his character, even though he found it the least engaging stretch of the book. A sickly boy who became a hunter, ranger, officer and author is a story about self-construction, and the books were part of the equipment.

The third is speed. By the autumn of 1901 Roosevelt was 42, and the office arrived through an assassin’s bullet, not an election. The title says “rise,” and the book is careful to stop at the top of the stairs.

What Reviewers Said

Reception was strong at the time. A 1979 piece in the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, held in the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, gathered excerpts from ten reviews of the book and describes all ten as positive. The publisher’s page for the Random House trilogy bundle carries two praise lines: The New York Times Book Review called the book both definitive for its period and entertaining to read, and Time gave it a short verdict.

“A towering biography.”

Time, quoted on the publisher’s page for the Roosevelt trilogy

Decades later the assessments held. In his 2019 obituary of Morris for the Washington Examiner, Philip Terzian credited the book with restoring Roosevelt’s standing after decades in the shadow of his distant cousin Franklin.

“A penetrating character study.”

Philip Terzian, Washington Examiner, 2019
Antique study desk with leather-bound volumes, handwritten pages and a fountain pen

Where It Draws Objections

Length is the first complaint. The reviewer at My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies gave the book 4¼ stars and called it a fascinating and rewarding introduction to Roosevelt, then listed the costs: the page count, a style he found “awkward and unremitting” in places, and a tendency for Morris to seem too deferential to his subject.

The deference charge has a context. Morris said that Roosevelt was so self-explanatory a subject that the author need not intrude on the narrative, a stance Wikipedia attributes to him in connection with Theodore Rex. For readers who want a biographer to push back on the subject, that restraint can read as admiration. For readers who want the life told straight, it is the point. Morris’s later experiment in Dutch, with its invented narrator, suggests he understood the difference.

Beyond the Page

No film adaptation of the book turned up while this review was being updated. The nearest screen companion is Ken Burns’s documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, about 14 hours long across seven parts, which premiered on PBS in September 2014. It follows Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and it opens with Theodore’s 1858 birth. It is a documentary and not an adaptation of the book.

Roosevelt’s story also made news this year. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened in Medora, North Dakota, on July 4, 2026, according to Valley News Live, in a 96,000-square-foot building that is open year-round. The library sits in the Badlands, the country where Roosevelt ranched and where Morris did the research that led to this book.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the book cover Roosevelt’s presidency?
No. It ends in September 1901, when McKinley dies and Roosevelt is sworn in. Theodore Rex (2001) covers the presidency, and Colonel Roosevelt (2010) covers what came after.

What awards did it win?
The 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 1980 National Book Award in biography.

Who is Edmund Morris?
A Kenya-born biographer who moved to the United States in 1968. He wrote the Roosevelt trilogy and Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), and died in 2019 at 78.

Is it a hard read?
It is long and detailed. One reviewer found the prose occasionally awkward and relentless but still called it a fascinating introduction to Roosevelt.

Where was Morris’s research kept?
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library announced in January 2024 that it had acquired the Edmund Morris archives, to be housed at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

Victorian New York brownstone street at dusk with gas lamps and a horse-drawn carriage

Where to Read It

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (affiliate link). This is the Modern Library paperback edition, the same one linked from the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Steve at My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies reviewed the book in February 2015 and weighs its strengths against its length. For the later volumes, Drew Bratcher’s 2010 review of Colonel Roosevelt in Washingtonian places the third book at the end of the trilogy.

Sources

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