The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter

The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President’s Books 

Edited by Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard 

Rowman and Littlefield, 2024 

Hardback: $120.00; eBook: $50.00 

Genre: Essays, History, Literary Criticism 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

During the recent state funeral for President Jimmy Carter, his White House domestic policy advisor, Stu Eisenstat, declared his intention to “lay to rest the myth that his greatest achievements came only as a former president.” As we ponder the impressive and lasting accomplishments Carter made to the world in his century of life, a compendium of essays about his many publications is newly available, edited by Mark I. West and 2025 Alabama Writers Hall of Fame inductee Frye Gaillard. Jimmy Carter, who did not use ghostwriters, published more books in his lifetime than any other president except Theodore Roosevelt. Reading The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President’s Books, I felt that I had experienced an intensive and rewarding symposium on the writer and his life. 

West and Gaillard have compiled twenty-three essays, beginning with editor Mark I. West’s analysis of Carter’s two campaign books, Why Not the Best? and A Government as Good as Its People, and concluding with Mark A. Lempke’s consideration of the final book, a 2018 meditation on the qualities of Faith: A Journey for All, written after Carter had overcome a life-threatening bout with cancer. Contributors to the collection include historians, journalists, poets, and scholars – many of whom have published previous works on Carter and his writing. Alabama writers include Caroline Gebhard, professor emerita at Tuskegee University; Charlotte Pence, Mobile, Alabama’s first poet laureate and director of Stokes Center for Creative Writing; and Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama. Frye Gaillard is the author of over thirty books, including Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy, is a former writer-in-residence at the University of South Alabama, and authored or co-authored five of the essays in The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter.  

Essayists include Michael J. Brown, Orville Vernon Burton, Ben Cohen, Paula T. Connolly, Boyd Davis, Paula Gallant Eckard, Kathy Merlock Jackson, Jeffrey B. Leak, Richard W. Leeman, Ronald F. Lunsford, Camille McCutcheon, Kaye Lanning Minchew, Nancy Mitchell, Marilynn Strasser Olson, Emily Seelbinder, Daniel Shealy, and Meredith Troutman-Jordan. 

I have read several of the books discussed in these pages, and I found that one of the book’s values for me, as a reader, was discovering books to read that I might have overlooked when they were first published. Especially enjoyable is the story behind Always a Reckoning, Carter’s book of poetry. Emily Seelbinder’s “A President’s Poetic Journey” delves into Carter’s passion for the poetry of Dylan Thomas, sparked by Thomas’s line, “After the first death, there is no other.” Carter would diagram Thomas’s poems to better comprehend them – and made his sons do the same. As governor of Georgia, Carter even organized a Dylan Thomas reading circle of Georgia senators. He said it is “almost inconceivable that Georgia Senators would be sitting around on the floor drinking beer and reading Dylan Thomas.” As president, Carter lobbied in Great Britain for Thomas’s inclusion in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, a goal that was achieved in 1982. 

Other Carter books, like An Outdoor Journal about Carter’s hunting and fishing life, emphasize how Carter adapted his values to all aspects of his life. He learned to fish on outings with Rachel Clark, a nurturing Black woman from his childhood who, with her husband, was often a surrogate parent. His lifelong “catch and release” philosophy that “We shouldn’t ever kill anything that we don’t need for food” carried over into his later practice to fly-fish with barbless hooks. Carter’s love and participation in the natural world led to his philosophy of conservation, which Ronald F. Lunsford considers an “outgrowth of Carter’s deep faith.”  

Carter wrote a children’s book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer (with illustrations by his daughter, Amy Carter), and the first historical novel written by an American President, The Hornet’s Nest, reviewed by Paula T. Connolly and Paula Gallant Eckard, respectively. There are books about Carter’s craftsmanship, particularly woodworking, and his paintings, in which the essay “Working with His Hands,” by Frye Gaillard and Caroline Gebhard, makes the connection between Carter’s paintings and those of folk artist Grandma Moses. 

Carter’s family and rural Southern upbringing, as well as his partnership and marriage with Rosalynn, inform his public and private life throughout the various narratives and are frequently noted by the essayists. He writes tributes to his mother, Miss Lillian, and Kathy Merlock Jackson ponders how the mother influenced her son’s progressive views. In Jeffrey B. Leak’s essay, “Jimmy Carter’s Narratives of Home,” he addresses Carter’s dismay when his closest Black childhood friends begin to defer to him as they get older. “A precious sense of equality had gone out of our personal relationship,” Carter writes, “and things were never again the same between them and me.” 

The books and essays that focus most on the Carter Presidency and events of that era are of the most obvious historical interest, and there is much to absorb regarding those topics. In “Reflections on Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith,” Frye Gaillard provides valuable insights into Carter’s personal perspectives on the Iran hostage negotiations and his Camp David negotiations with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Ben Cohen, in “The Blood of Abraham: Jimmy Carter’s Search for Peace in the Middle East,” describes Carter’s book as “a guide to both the opportunities and the obstacles of securing a broad Israeli – Palestinian – Arab peace in the region” while examining the influence of Biblical texts on Carter’s response to the contemporary situation. Cohen ponders how Carter’s writing seems to downplay the role of European antisemitism and that of the world at large in complicating the Mideast situation. 

Perhaps of most interest to me personally is Nancy Mitchell’s “Cri de Coeur: Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” about Carter’s most controversial and consequential book. I was an admirer of that prescient analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict from the beginning, although it was met with zealous denunciation and derision upon its publication in 2006.  Mitchell looks at the controversy while tracing how some of the most extreme criticisms were tempered or withdrawn. Mitchell concludes that “Carter was a prophet, a Cassandra. And we did not listen. I think it may be the saddest book I have ever read.”    

What comes through most constantly throughout the collection is not only Jimmy Carter’s strength of character but also his strength as a human being. He is known for his fervent faith; without faith, he says, “I would feel destitute.” That strong religious faith was ever-present but not obtrusive as Carter strove for a competent and compassionate government as he navigated the secular and the sacred. As Ronald F. Lunsford points out in his essay about Living Faith, Carter’s memoir about his evolving Christian faith, Carter was “a nuclear engineer who would unabashedly tell you that he talked with God many times a day.” Throughout the essays in The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter, our current national situation is alluded to but rarely addressed directly. The most pointed allusions come in “Finding Our Way Again,” Charlotte Pence’s essay on Carter’s memoir, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life. She discusses Carter’s primarily optimistic book with the realization that a current reading may “demonstrate just how terribly we have lost our way.” 

In that National Cathedral eulogy, Stu Eisenstat said that Carter “may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills.” Taking the full measure of the man and his impressive literary oeuvre, I would suggest that the Carter Center is by far the more fitting monument to Jimmy Carter than a carving on a remote mountain.    

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).