Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 7 Most Notable Books

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author whose perspective on American history and presidential leadership has profoundly affected how readers view this country's past and present.

• Beginnings: Born in Brooklyn, New York, Doris’s love of history began as a child: She enjoyed giving her father play-by-play recaps of Brooklyn Dodgers games, and she listened intently to her mother’s memories of her own childhood. These experiences taught Doris that history is more than facts and figures—it comes to life with great stories told from beginning to middle to end.
• Early career: Goodwin graduated magna cum laude from Colby College before earning her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. In 1967, she served as a White House Fellow during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Despite penning an article supporting Johnson's removal from office over his handling of the Vietnam War, LBJ still asked Doris to work on his anti-poverty programs. A decade later, while Goodwin was teaching at Harvard, she would help him draft his memoirs. Their conversations would lead to her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which became a New York Times best-seller in 1977.
• Books: Goodwin has since published numerous books on the presidency and politics, including Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), which won the Lincoln Prize in 2006 and served as the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning film Lincoln (2012). She also parlayed her lifelong love of baseball into a memoir, Wait Until Next Year, in 1997. Her latest book for Simon & Schuster is 2018's Leadership in Turbulent Times, which profiles the challenges faced by the presidents she calls “my guys”—Lincoln, Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt—to establish a framework for leadership under duress that can apply to all readers.
• Media work: Goodwin is a frequent commentator on NBC's Meet the Press, PBS, Fox News, and CNN, has served as a consultant on Ken Burns's documentary Baseball, and co-produced the 2020 miniseries Washington. She is also the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Charles Frankel Prize, the Carnegie Medal, and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.
• Honors: Doris’s work has garnered numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Carnegie Medal, the Lincoln Prize, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Charles Frankel Prize, the New England Book Award, and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has penned numerous notable books, including the following:

1. 1. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1977): Doris’s first book serves as an intimate window into Johnson’s charismatic character and pursuit of power in the context of the tumultuous 1960s, informed by her tenure in the LBJ White House.
2. 2. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga (1987): Epic in scale, Kerwin's book profiles an enduring American political dynasty that encompasses the family's early years in Massachusetts to John F. Kennedy's presidency and beyond.
3. 3. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994): Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for this look at FDR and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal and political lives during America's tumultuous involvement in World War II.
4. 4. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (1997): Goodwin's love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which ended in 1958 with their move to Los Angeles (she's since become a Boston Red Sox fan), provides the portal for this memoir about her childhood in New York.
5. 5. Team of Rivals; The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005): A favorite of President Barack Obama, Goodwin's book examines Lincoln's drive to save the Union during the Civil War by employing the talents of a cabinet filled with one-time political adversaries.
6. 6. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013): Goodwin won the Carnegie Medal for her best-selling account of the complex relationship between the two presidents and the rise of the modern American press.
7. 7. Leadership In Turbulent Times (2018): Doris looks anew at the presidents she’s studied most closely through the exclusive lens of leadership. The book is the culmination of five decades of studying presidential history.

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