My "first encounter with Theodore Roosevelt was in Pittsburgh about 1943. He was busy stealing the show in a Peabody High School production of Arsenic and Old Lace and I, at age ten or so, thought him sensational, and especially since in real life he was my oldest brother, Hax.

……

Mornings on Horseback is the authoritative biography of the youngTheodore Roosevelt. Written by David McCuUough, the author of presidential biographies Truman and John Adams, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.

His father was the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. His mother, Mittie Bul loch Roosevelt, was a Southerner and a celebrated beauty but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There were sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott(who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt),and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR"s first love. And while Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and Senator Roscoe Conkling play a part, it is the diverse and deeply human Roosevelt family, all brought vividly to life, which give this book its remarkable power.

Mornings on Horseback spans seventeen years from 1869 when little "Teedie" is ten, to 1886 when, as a hardened "real life cowboy," he returns from the West to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin anew as a grown man, whole in body and spirit. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about "blessed" mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands. It is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history, and a work of important scholarship that does away with several old myths and breaks new ground.

  Author"s Note

     PART ONE

1.  Greatheart"s Circle

2.  Lady from the South

3.  Grand Tour

4.  A Disease of the Direst Suffering

5.  Metamorphosis

     PART TWO

6.  Uptown

7.  The Moral Effect

8.  Father and Son

     PART THREE

9.  Harvard

10.  Especially Pretty Alice

11.  Home Is the Hunter

12.  Politics

13.  Strange and Terrible Fate

14.  Chicago

15.  Glory Days

16.  Return

  Afterword