Great-Heart: The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt

Henderson, Daniel, 1880-1955Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
280K words
Chapters
28

Tags

English Originals Political and Military Leaders Political LeadersAmerican HistoryLeadershipPortrait GalleryLegendary LivesPresidential BiographyRooseveltInspirationPatriotismSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today."Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt by Daniel HendersonAuthor: Henderson, Daniel, 1880-1955,Language: English, Class: E740: History: America: Twentieth century, Release Date: Jun 29, 2015

Editor's review

This is an English-language biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Under the title "Great-Heart," author Daniel Henderson traces the life of the 26th U.S. president from a frail boy to a powerful political figure. As a free public-domain e-book from Project Gutenberg, its value lies first in the accessibility of the original text: readers can read, at no cost, an early twentieth-century biographer's close-up observations and contemporary judgments of Roosevelt. The prose carries the marks of biographical writing of its era, more narrative than analytical, making it suitable as an introductory work for understanding Roosevelt and his times, and also as a primary source for studying early Roosevelt biography. Readers are advised to place it within the historical context of the American Progressive Era and to read it alongside Roosevelt's own writings or later biographies, the better to appreciate how different eras shaped the same figure. The electronic edition facilitates searching names and events, making it well suited to note-taking while reading.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and chapter titles to grasp the book's structure, which unfolds by stages of life, then select key chapters for close reading.
  2. While reading, consult a timeline of the American Progressive Era and understand the subject's experiences in their historical context.
  3. When encountering unfamiliar names or places, use the e-edition's search function to check them as you go; there is no need to struggle over every word.
  4. After finishing, choose one or two chapters to read alongside Roosevelt's autobiography or later biographies, comparing the different authors' choices.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? Is it hard to read? The original is in English, published as a public-domain e-edition by Project Gutenberg. The prose belongs to early twentieth-century biographical writing; sentences tend to be long but the narrative is clear. Readers with college-level English can finish it with the help of a dictionary; those with weaker English are advised to first read a Chinese-language Roosevelt biography as a foundation.
Is this an authoritative scholarly biography of Roosevelt? No. It is an earlier popular biography. The author, Henderson, excels at narrative, and the book reflects how people of his time observed and evaluated Roosevelt. For scholarly research, it should be treated as an early biographical text and used in comparison with modern historical works.
What are the practical advantages of the e-edition? The Project Gutenberg edition is free, downloadable in multiple formats, and supports full-text search. Readers can quickly locate people, events, and dates, making it suitable for reading notes or excerpting quotations, and convenient for reading by topic rather than straight through from beginning to end.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Henderson, Daniel, 1880-1955 Author · 1880–1955

Daniel Henderson (1880–1955) was an American writer whose work centered on biography and popular historical writing. His better-known book is Great-Heart: The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt, a life of Theodore Roosevelt. Judging from this work, he was skilled at presenting political figures to general readers, narrating their upbringing, character, and public career in a clear, story-driven manner and setting individual lives against their historical background. Public information on his birthplace, education, and professional career is limited, and the library holds only one of his works, so a fuller assessment of his writing is difficult. The available material indicates that he was among the authors of the first half of the twentieth century who took part in public historical reading through biography, and his Roosevelt biography remains the main basis for understanding his approach.