Eleanor and Franklin

No other American marriage has had such far-reaching consequences for history as that of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. In outline, the story of this partnership of forty-five years is well known. But here, for the first time, it is told in the depth that its importance warrants and with an under-standing that brings it into new and brilliant focus.

For many years Joseph P. Lash was a close friend and political associate of Mrs. Roosevelt. From personal knowledge, the vast Hyde Park collection of papers, and formidable research has come an incomparable work—filled not only with a wealth of new material but with a superb sense of both personal drama and historical event.

Throughout this story, the human side and history interweave and interact. Eleanor Roosevelt's anguished childhood in the Old New York of Edith Wharton is narrated with marvelous delicacy and insight. So is her courtship, highlighted by the letters of singular insight and purity which this shy young girl wrote to her princely suitor. All this is personal drama. But—like Eleanor Roosevelt's difficulties with her mother-in-law and her shattering discovery of her husband's love for Lucy Mercer—it was to resolve itself in the role that Mrs. Roosevelt came to play as a world figure.

This, then, is the real story of a human relationship, uniquely fascinating and moving in itself, and supremely important for its influence on the destiny of the nation and the world. Its telling is worthy of its participants and of the era that it illuminates and reveals.