Goodenough
Elizabeth Goodenough and Marilynn S. Olson are the editors of the book What the Presidents Read: Childhood Stories and Family Favorites. Goodenough teaches at the University of Michigan, and Olson is a professor emerita at Texas State University.
Q: What inspired you to create What the Presidents Read?
A: The idea hatched at the 2017 Children’s Literature Association conference in Tampa. After Marilynn Olson’s exciting talk on JFK and Billy Whiskers, Liz Goodenough approached her about collaborating on a book that would cover all of the presidents’ favorite books.
Q: How did you choose the material to include, and did you find anything that especially surprised you?
Olson
A: “What was your favorite book when you were a kid?,” a traditional question to ask American presidential candidates, has embedded many “favorites” in interview material and presidential memoirs.
Letters and speeches also quote from stories presidents read as children: Aesop’s Fables often appears in this way. Some presidents advise children to read the books that were first valuable to them. Childhood books that presidents kept and wrote in as adults are also suggestive.
LBJ’s name inscribed on the front of two early books changes from round elementary school letters to his later dashing presidential signature.
The book is organized around eight themes, so some presidents and first family members are represented more than once when they had “favorites” in more than one category.
We divided chapters to identify youthful interests: history and geography; sports, games, play, and music; animal tales; oral recitations, speeches, plays heard or performed; instructive lessons valued later; newspapers and magazines (often more available than books); biographies and autobiographies of famous people; and fictional stories.
Everyone will have their own surprises. We loved thinking about Garfield trying to go to sea from rural Ohio because he had read the Jack Halyard story about a sailor boy. Fillmore may be forgotten as a president, but he established the first White House library in interesting ways.
Q: Do you see any particular trends as far as presidential reading is concerned?
A: For the presidents, a childhood book may represent a turn in the course of history. Their early reading can both reflect and instigate patterns and future trends.
Many presidential favorites are not current household names– some quite unknown to most people – but they were very popular in their culture. Rollin’s Ancient History, for example, explains how the founders, their families, and their fellow citizens thought about the world.
“Favorites” are a window into another time and electorate. Many presidents seemed to recognize early the things they’d need in the books they read.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: That presidents and first ladies were real people and quite possibly not the people that we thought we knew. That we can ponder and compare what we ourselves were like and the books we read as we imagine their different beginnings.
The profound influence of childhood reading and the importance of literacy to a democracy.
Q: What are you working on now?
EG: Teaching “Children Under Fire: Narratives of Sustainability” at University of Michigan. Writing to pinpoint how during the 19th century fairy tales and bird figures combined in a mystical understanding of the child as a spiritual communicator. Publishing James Munro Leaf’s poetry and prose, A Revolution of One (Atmosphere Press 2026).
MO: Researching an internationally known children’s outdoor game mentioned in the 18th century “first” children’s book by John Newbery, but pictured centuries before and still played today -- and also the relation of the Billy Whiskers series to the Oz books – both travel adventures that were rivals in the first decade of the 20th century.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We arranged the book to be a browse with “choose your own adventure” page numbers at the bottom of the presidential passages that can be pursued to know more about the story.
The book can bring life to history or English teaching: we are within a few days of posting a chronological list of presidents and First Families with notes and special links for quick reference on our website: whatthepresidentsread.net
We hope the book helps teachers (and readers who are not browsers at heart). We would love to hear how its reception works out.
In a polarized world, everyone has been a child. Studying this universal experience and representations of childhood can offer a way to understand difference as we strive to live together in peace.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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