Even at a century’s remove, TR is still considered a most masterful self-promoter and documentarian. Famed photographer Cherry Kearton captured scenes with a hand-cranked motion picture camera during TR’s 1910 post-presidential trip to Africa. When pursuing boat thieves in the Dakotas in the mid-1880s, Billings’ County “deputy sheriff” Roosevelt traveled with a camera. Rafting for three days on the partially frozen Little Missouri River, TR and his two companions caught and photographed the three “absolutely surprised” thieves. All the while TR kept his diary and read Tolstoy. In the 24-volume Memorial Edition, the redoubtable Hermann Hagedorn edited the most complete collection of the Works of Theodore Roosevelt. Much of this unexampled presidential oeuvre derives from TR’s lifelong habit of assiduous diary keeping. Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life adroitly celebrates this and other adventuresome episodes through the unique perspective of TR’s “lifelong engagement with books” and his cacoëthes scribendi. For diary entries covering the candidly informative nine years during which both TR’s parents and first wife died and he subsequently sequestered himself to the Dakotas, noted TR scholar Edward P. Kohn has edited in one volume A Most Glorious Ride: The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877–1886. Such diary entries would invariably eventuate in first-person narrated monographs and articles. Representative among the former are such indispensably canonical works as Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail; The Rough Riders; The Winning of the West; African Game Trails; Through the Brazilian Wilderness; and Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography. In fact, Roosevelt’s favorite humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, considered The Rough Riders so irredeemably solipsistic that he ventriloquized through his Irish pub alter ego, Mr. Dooley: “if I was him I’d call th’ book ‘Alone in Cubia.’” Representative articles are his 1899 The Rough Rider serializations for Scribner’s Magazine, as well as many other editorials and articles appearing in Metropolitan, Outlook, McClure’s, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines and newspapers (see http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/treditorials.html).
