An entertaining and eye-opening biography of America’s most memorable first daughter

From the moment Teddy Roosevelt’s outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business. Historian Stacy Cordery’s unprecedented access to personal papers and family archives enlivens and informs this richly entertaining portrait of America’s most memorable first daughter and one of the most influential women in twentieth-century American society and politics.

Stacy A. Cordery is chairman of the history department at Monmouth College in Illinois and is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern. She is the bibliographer for the National First Ladies’ Library. This is her third book.