Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only twentieth-century president consistently ranked by historians with the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln. His leadership in the dark hours of the Depression and the Second World War has endowed him in the eyes of many with an aura of greatness, and his presidency has been the explicit or implicit model for all of his successors, from Truman to Clinton. In this concise biography, Patrick J. Maney provides an original and insightful reexamination of Roosevelt's life and legacy, carefully sifting fact from myth and showing how the Roosevelt legend—for good and for ill—has shaped the modern presidency.

Patrick J. Maney is Professor and Chair of the History Department, University of South Carolina and the author of "Young Bob" La Follette: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette Jr., 1895-1953 (1978).

"Maney's work both demystifies Roosevelt and reminds us of his centrality to modern American history. Deeply informed, elegantly written, and persuasively argued, it stands as a major scholarly achievement."—Ellis W. Hawley, American Historical Review

"Maney brings cool judgment to bear on the best loved, most hated, most influential, and most enigmatic personality of modern America. . . . A model, compact biography."—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Political Science Quarterly

"Easily the most thoughtful, politically astute, and historiographically up to date of the many single-volume biographies."—Anthony J. Badger, author of The New Deal

"The most penetrating and best balanced assessment of FDR as political leader and man of his times that has yet been published."—John Milton Cooper, author of The Warrior and the Priest

Listen to an interview with the author on the NPR website