POLL: Presidents as writers:

no pulitzer prize winner jfk?

Ghost writer Ted Sorensen wasn't a president.

bill ayers joke here

soto i want to hear yr jefferson over lincoln argument (you voted jefferson right?). also curious why reagan's here but not nixon.

I had no hesitation about voting Lincoln over Jefferson as thinker and stylist, with Madison and TR as runners-up (Adams' letters are more coherent than his political writings). Were I teaching 19th century American lit, I'd teach Lincoln alongside Melville, Dickinson, and Twain: this is where American prose ceases to emulate its European forebears.

Nixon is a HUGE oversight. If a mod wants to include him, I'd be most grateful.

This is masterful. And it's only a letter.

From limited reading, maybe Lincoln, then Roosevelt, then Grant, then Obama, then Jefferson -- haven't read the others

Grant's Personal Memoirs was one of Gertrude Stein's favorite books.

Other presidents wrote books? I thought for sure that President Obama was the first.

Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia is a weirdly hypnotic piece of writing--a mass of kinda cute natural history regularly salted with rousing anti-clerical sentiments and ludicrous racism.

he didn't really write anything book-length that was great but if you snipped out and combined all the great passages from his letters, papers, etc., you'd have a pretty good case for jefferson taking top honors here. for sheer florid elegance combined with occasional acid pungency, he's easily the most readable and relevant of the founders. i'm still voting for lincoln, of course.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Lincoln had the writing thing cold.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

No, I did not vote for Obama--I have his books but haven't read them. The only presidental book I've ever read was Six Crises.