Eleanor and Franklin

Eleanor and Franklin - Joseph P. Lash

In his extraordinary biography of an extraordinary couple, Joseph P. Lash reconstructs the Roosevelt’s four-decade marriage from Eleanor’s personal papers. The result is an intimate look at the vibrant private world of the public persona.

Joseph P. Lash (1909–1987) was an American radical political activist, journalist, and author. A close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lash won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award in Biography for Eleanor and Franklin (1971), the first of two volumes he wrote about the former First Lady. 

In 1950, Lash went to work for the New York Post as the paper's United Nations correspondent.

Lash began his career as a chronicler of the Roosevelt Administration in 1952, when he assisted Franklin D. Roosevelt's son, Elliott Roosevelt, with the editing for publication of two volumes of the President's letters.

In 1961, Lash published his first full-length book, a biography of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Thereafter, he moved to a position as assistant editor of the New York Post's editorial page, staying in that capacity until 1966.

Following Eleanor Roosevelt's death in 1962, Lash set to work writing a memoir of her, published two years later as Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend's Memoir.[6] This fair and familiar treatment of his friend kept him in the Roosevelt family's eye. Two years after the publication of this book, in 1966, Lash received a telephone call from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., the literary executor of his mother. Roosevelt asked whether Lash might like to take a look at Eleanor Roosevelt's personal papers, with a view to writing a biography. Lash accepted this offer with gusto, quit his job at the Post, and began a five-year project which would culminate in the publication of the first installment of a two-part biography, Eleanor and Franklin. This book, which dealt sympathetically but candidly with the Roosevelts' sometimes troubled marriage, made headlines and garnered critical praise. It won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1972, cementing Lash's prominence as an independent writer. A series of literary projects ensued.