Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
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Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan is the title of a book written by Edmund Morris about Ronald Reagan, The 40th President of The United States. There is much controversy about the book, cited by the Amazon.com editorial staff as "one of the most unusual and critically scrutinized biographies ever written." Some debate if Dutch should even be referred to as a biography at all.
After the unprecedented success of his Pulitzer Prize Winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was given the greenlight by the administration to write the first authorized biography of a sitting president, granting him behind the scenes access never before given to a writer at The White House. Almost unbelievably, these privileges were of little use. Reagan devoted most of their conversations to tired anecdotes, tall tales and evasions. Even less informative was the President's own private diary. The President was discovered by the author to be a "hollow man" of sorts.
Morris eventually decided to scrap writing a straight biography and turn his piece into an historical novel about the President told from the viewpoint of an imaginary peer from the same town as Ronald Reagan. The person comes from the same town as, continualy runs into and later keeps track of Reagan. The first time the fictional narrator sees him is at a 1926 football game in Dixon, Illinois. He asks a friend who the fellow running down the field "with extraordinary grace" is, and he is informed that it's "Dutch" Reagan.
The novel has caused confusion in that it contains many characters who never existed, including scenes where they interact with real people. Morris goes so far as to include misleading endnotes about such imaginary characters to thoroughly confuse his reading audience. Elsewhere, scenes are dramaticized or else completely made up.
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