Draft Cover

A Tortured Soul

Elliott Roosevelt – Brother of a President,
Father of a First Lady

Most significantly for history, Elliott was the father of Eleanor Roosevelt, liberal activist and world humanitarian. He was also the architect of her soul. During their ten years together, Elliott loved and cherished her, molded her character and imparted determination, courage and fortitude, qualities that would, in time, enable her to occupy a pedestal in history as First Lady of the World.

Elliott’s story is a bleak but tantalizing one, filled with episodes of frightful drunkenness, opiate abuse, and marital unfaithfulness. In the long, broad shadow of the dynamic Theodore, Elliott seemed to fail at everything he tried: school, business, relationships, even rehabilitation. At the same time, Elliott was a victim of a recurrent, mysterious illness, injury and his own disabling feelings of self-worth.

There are uplifting aspects to the tale that allow it to rise above soap opera: the persistent, valiant efforts by Theodore and his sisters to rescue Elliott from himself, to offer him second and third chances, and to recoup the family’s eroding reputation. But the most heartwarming backstory of all is the auspicious pairing of mutually adoring father and daughter, of Elliott and Eleanor, for an all-too-brief decade.

In recalling Elliott’s life, we watch Theodore’s hope and patience erode. At the end, he wrote of Elliott, “He was like some stricken, hunted creature, and indeed, he was hunted by the most terrible demons that ever entered into a man’s body and soul.”

  A Tortured Soul will be published in 2017 by ForeEdge, the trade division of the University Press of New England. It will be the final book in the author’s Roosevelt “trilogy,” succeeding The Lion and the Journalist and Quentin & Flora.

Coming soon!

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