Based in Michigan, Craig Comer focuses his professional efforts on real estate investment and the management of Mosquito Joe franchises. An avid reader of nonfiction, Craig Comer particularly enjoys learning about history. He regularly visits presidential museums and libraries in Michigan and beyond.
One unique form of nonfiction associated with the American president is the memoir. With the noteworthy exception of George H. W. Bush, nearly all of those who have led the country since World War II have penned full-length works about their lives and time in the presidency. The most recent of these was Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which saw publication in December of 2020.
As noted in the New York Times, the book came out nearly four years after the end of Obama’s presidency, which represented the longest wait, after the author left office, for any presidential memoir. Reasons for this lengthy delay included its 800-page length and the fact that the work was written in the traditional format of pen and ink. Moreover, Obama did not keep a consistent diary while in office, as Jimmy Carter did, and which Carter fruitfully used as a basis for Keeping Faith.
While Bill Clinton’s memoir was even longer than Obama's, it benefited from an approach in which the former president sat down with a historian and foreign policy speechwriter, and was interviewed. This oral narrative was then transcribed and edited.
Other presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson, had the benefit of working with aides and ghostwriters, who helped them craft their works. While Obama had aides help him with research aspects of the project, his publisher, Crown, noted that he wrote the actual prose on his own. After Obama's, the memoir that took the longest in coming out was Richard Nixon’s RN; this reflected the fact that the former president was also busy working through litigation stemming from Watergate.
