“Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels. I don’t mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written.”
Roosevelt was a speed reader and it was common for him to read a book a day! Along with enjoying reading, he was an popular author himself, writing many books and articles for magazines of the period. So you might be asking, what did Roosevelt himself recommend for books to read? A friend did ask, and TR sent him this short list to get him started!
Theodore Roosevelt’s Reading List
Title | Author |
The History of the Peloponnesian War | Thucydides |
The Histories | Herodotus |
The Histories | Polybius |
Plutarch’s Lives | Plutarch |
Oresteia Trilogy | Aeschylus |
Seven Against Thebes | Aeschylus |
Hippolytus | Euripides |
The Bacchae | Euripides |
Frogs | Aristophones |
Politics | Aristotle |
Early Age of Greece | William Ridgeway |
Alexander the Great | Benjamin Ide Wheeler |
History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria | Gaston Maspero |
Chronicles | Froissart |
The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot | Baron de Marbot |
Charles XII and the Collapse of the Swedish Empire | Robert Nisbet Bain |
Types of Naval Officers | AT Mahan |
Critical and Historical Essays | Thomas Macaulay |
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon |
The Life of Prince Eugene | Prince Eugene of Savoy |
Life of Lieut.-Admiral De Ruyter | G Grinnell-Milne |
Life of Sobieski | John Sobieski |
Frederick the Great | Thomas Carlyle |
Abraham Lincoln: A History | Hay and Nicolay |
Speeches and Writings | Abraham Lincoln |
The Essays | Francis Bacon |
Macbeth | Shakespeare |
Twelfth Night | Shakespeare |
Henry IV | Shakespeare |
Henry the Fifth | Shakespeare |
Richard II | Shakespeare |
Paradise Lost | John Milton |
Poems | Michael Drayton |
Nibelungenlied | Anonymous |
Inferno | Dante (prose translastion by Carlyle) |
Beowulf | (Samuel H. Church translation) |
Heimskringla: Lives of the Norse Kings | Snorri Sturluson |
The Story of Burnt Njal | (George Dasent translation) |
Gisli the Outlaw | (George Dasent translation) |
Cuchulain of Muirthemne | (Lady Gregory translation) |
The Affected Young Ladies | Moliere |
The Barber of Seville | Gioachino Rossini |
The Kingis Quair | James I of Scotland |
Over the Teacups | Oliver Wendell Holmes |
Shakespeare and Voltaire | Thomas Lounsbury |
Sevastopol Sketches | Leo Tolstoy |
The Cossacks | Leo Tolstoy |
With Fire and Sword | Henryk Sienkiewicz |
Guy Mannering | Sir Walter Scott |
The Antiquary | Sir Walter Scott |
Rob Roy | Sir Walter Scott |
Waverly | Sir Walter Scott |
Quentin Durward | Sir Walter Scott |
Marmion | Sir Walter Scott |
The Lay of the Last Minstrel | Sir Walter Scott |
The Pilot | James Fenimore Cooper |
Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain |
The Pickwick Papers | Charles Dickens |
Nicholas Nickleby | Charles Dickens |
Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
The History of Pendennis | William Makepeace Thackeray |
The Newcomes | William Makepeace Thackeray |
The Adventures of Philip | William Makepeace Thackeray |
The White Company | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
Charles O’Malley | Charles Lever |
Poems | John Keats |
Poems | Robert Browning |
Poems | Edgar Allan Poe |
Poems | Lord Alfred Tennyson |
Poems | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
Poems | Rudyard Kipling |
Poems | Bliss Carman |
Tales | Edgard Allan Poe |
Essays | James Russell Lowell |
Complete Stories | Robert Louis Stevenson |
British Ballads | William Allingham |
The Simple Life | Charles Wagner |
The Rose and the Ring | William Makepeace Thackeray |
Fairy Tales | Hans Andersen |
Grimm’s Fairy Tales | Grimm Bros |
The Story of King Arthur | Howard Pyle |
Complete Tales of Uncle Remus | Joel Chandler Harris |
The Woman Who Toils | Bessie Van Vorst |
The Golden Age | Kenneth Grahame |
All on the Irish Shore | Somerville & Ross |
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. | Somerville & Ross |
Asia and Europe | Meredith Townsend |
Youth: A Narrative | Joseph Conrad |
Works | Artemus Ward |
Stories of a Western Town | Octave Thanet |
My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War | Ben Viljoen |
Through the Subarctic Forest | Warburton Pike |
Cross Country with Horse and Hound | Frank Sherman Peer |
Ways of Nature | John Burroughs |
The Real Malay | Frank Swettenham |
Gallops | David Gray |
Napoleon Jackson | Ruth Stuart |
The Passing of Thomas | Thomas Janvier |
The Benefactress | Elizabeth von Arnim |
People of the Whirlpool | Mabel Osgood Wright |
Call of the Wild | Jack London |
The Little Sheperd of Kingdom Come | John Fox |
The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop | Hamlin Garland |
The Gentleman from Indiana | Booth Tarkington |
The Crisis | Winston Churchill |
John Ermine of the Yellowstone | Frederic Remington |
The Virginian | Owen Wister |
Red Men and White | Owen Wister |
Philosophy 4 | Owen Wister |
Lin McLean | Owen Wister |
The Blazed Trail | Stewart Edward White |
Conjuror’s House | Stewart Edward White |
The Claim Jumpers | Stewart Edward White |
American Revolution | George Otto Trevelyan |
You have some reading to do!