Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online

by Jeff Smith

In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy's novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are "might-have-beens" like Philip Roth's President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299231844
• ISBN13: 9780299231842
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.9" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent, enjoyable, innovative book

_The Presidents We Imagine_ is a fascinating and engrossing book. Smith begins by describing just how novel a task the founders faced in creating the office of chief executive of the new federal government. There were no real models to follow. Kings, emperors, consuls, tribunes--none of them suited the new revolutionary nation. As Smith shows, the office of president had to be imagined almost out of whole cloth. From those original imaginings has evolved an office whose holder is the most powerful individual on the planet. It's an extraordinary story and Smith tells it extremely well, examining in detail a remarkable array of acts of imagination concerning the presidency from the 18th century to the present day. He handles multiple genres and forms of popular imagination with compelling skill and perceptiveness. The accounts of Washington, Jackson and Lincoln put these hoary figures in a new context that defamiliarizes them in an unusually rewarding way. The treatment of the modern era is penetrating, shrewd, fair--and often quite humorous. Smith knows his subject so thoroughly that he effortlessly packs many individual pages of the book with a startling number of sharp, finely- honed insights. He is a polished, lucid writer with equal strength in both narrative and analysis. As a result, the book is a distinct pleasure to read, and also a truly innovative contribution to American cultural and political history.