Doris Kearns Goodwin

"But the great thing about the 19th century is that all these people kept diaries, they wrote letters.  Somehow, they're running the Civil War during the day and they go home and write five-page letters to their wives and their children, or write these voluminous diaries.  And that gives you a more intimate sense."

When asked why she continues to write presidential biographies, Goodwin answered, "It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I'm out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That's all you can really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all of the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them."

Today is the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1943). She is best known for her biographies of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize (1995) for her book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994)