Edith Wharton' s novel The Age of Innocence (1920) gives a vivid picture of the New York high society that Roosevelt grew up in.

Cook points out that Virginia Woolf's life paralleled that of Roosevelt's in many ways. Woolf s A Room of One's Own (1929) explores how difficult it was in those days for a woman to make a distinctive mark of her own in life.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2, The Defining Years 1933-1938 (1999) is Cook's second volume in her three-volume biography. It covers Roosevelt' s life as an innovative First Lady in the early years of the New Deal. This fast-paced, insightful narrative was acclaimed by critics.

The essays in Eleanor Roosevelt's You Learn By Living (reprint ed., 1983) contain a wealth of practical advice and wisdom to enable people to live a more fulfilling life: "There is no experience from which...