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MU's Smith to write biography of George W. Bush

July 30, 2008 @ 03:10 PM

2008/The Herald-Dispatch

Herald-Dispatch.com

HUNTINGTON -  Marshall University professor and biographer Jean Edward Smith will write a one-volume biography of George W. Bush to be titled W, it was announced today by Gina Centrello, president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group.  Smith also wrote FDR,  which won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a national bestseller.

Random House Executive Editor Bob Loomis, who edited Smith’s FDR biography, acquired world rights from the author.

Smith is currently writing a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to be delivered in 2009. The Bush biography is expected to be published in 2012.

“Jean Smith is able to take subjects of enormous complexity and refine them into beautifully lucid, sensitive and lively narratives,” Loomis said in a press release from Marshall. “He is an exceptional writer whose single-volume biographies have been praised over and over as the best of their kind.”

Smith commented that Bush is one of the most controversial presidents in American history, and likely to become more so.

"The dust will have settled by 2012, the first wave of memoirs will have subsided, and there will be sufficient distance for informed, historical judgment to set the record straight,” Smith said in the press release.

Smith is the author of 12 books, including biographies of Chief Justice John Marshall, General Lucius D. Clay, and Ulysses S. Grant (a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist). He taught at the University of Toronto for 35 years before joining the faculty of Marshall University, where he is the John Marshall Professor of Political Science.