THE LIBRARY MOVES UPTOWN:
Eleanor Roosevelt
This is My Story
(1937)
Eleanor Roosevelt with her younger brother Hall
from This is My Story
"Very early I became conscious of the fact that there were men and women and children around me who suffered in one way or another. I think I was five or six when my father took me for the first time to help serve Thanksgiving Day dinner in one of the newsboys' clubhouses which my grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt, had started. He was also a Trustee of the Childrens Aid Society for many years. I was tremendously interested in all these ragged little boys and in the fact, which my father explained, that many of them had no homes and lived in little wooden shanties in empty lots, or slept in vestibules of houses or public buildings or any place where they could be moderately warm. Yet they were independent and earned their own livings. "
During President Roosevelt's first term in office, with millions of Americans still struggling under the shadow of the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt emerged as a strong and humane voice for her husband's New Deal. In a break with tradition, she held weekly press conferences with women reporters, broadcast regularly, and traveled tirelessly across the country on his behalf. A daily newspaper columnist for the United Feature Syndicate, Roosevelt also wrote countless articles for popular publications. She spoke and wrote simply and to the point.
Off-stage, Roosevelt's friends and family loved to hear her stories about her early life. Secretly, Roosevelt had always wanted to write a novel or a play but did not think she had the technical skills. Encouraged by her literary agent, George Bye, she considered writing her autobiography. Now in the late fall of 1936 on the campaign train with FDR who was seeking his second term, she dictated sections of This is My Story to her personal secretary, Tommy Thompson. Her biographer Joseph Lash comments on her "incredible ability" to work under deadline pressure.
The Ladies' Home Journal paid $75,000 for serial rights, the same year the book was published by Harper & Brothers. Roosevelt's editors praised the "simplicity and forthrightness" of the early chapters which describe her unhappy childhood. They were "all aglow" with what she had submitted. But the second half of the manuscript required more work. Eleanor was less forthcoming about her years in Washington, her husband's struggle with polio and her relationship with her notoriously di"cult mother-in-law. Nor did she allude to the strains imposed on her marriage by her husband's affair with her private secretary Lucy Mercer. About one chapter, her editor Bruce Gould burst out "it has nothing to say - in fact - it's terrible!" Uncertain as a writer, Eleanor took criticisms seriously and in the end successfully deepened the dramatic tone of her book.
Praise for This is My Story came from many quarters - from her publishers, from the powerful, from her cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth who acknowledged that Eleanor could indeed write but, most importantly, from the poor, who felt she understood their own struggles and identified with her. At a book party, a radiant Eleanor said to her publishers, "I can't tell you what it means to have this wonderful recognition for something I have done myself not on account of Franklin's position."
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