Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt. This item is unavailable.Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

"There are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling limitless prairies, with rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Bad Lands." —Theodore Roosevelt

He was born a city boy in Manhattan; but it wasn't until he lived as a cattle rancher and deputy sheriff in the wild country of the Dakota Territory that Theodore Roosevelt became the man who would be president. "I have always said I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota," Roosevelt later wrote. It was in the "grim fairyland" of the Bad Lands that Roosevelt became acquainted with the ways of cowboys, Native Americans, trappers, thieves, and wild creatures--and it was there that his spirit was forged and tested.

In Forging a President, author William Hazelgrove uses Roosevelt's own reflections to immerse readers in the formative seasons that America's twenty-sixth president spent in "the broken country" of the Wild West.

William Hazelgrove is the author of Madam President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson, a Literary Guild Selection and History Book Club Selection, and ten novels, including The Pitcher (2013), a Junior Library Guild Selection. His books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, Book of the Month Selections, Junior Library Guild Selections, and ALA Editor's Choice Awards. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer-in-Residence, where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway's birthplace. He has been the subject of interviews in NPR's All Things Considered along with features in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch, USA Today, People, Channel 11, NBC, WBEZ, and WGN. Hazelgrove also runs a political culture blog, The View from Hemingway's Attic.