When Famous Writers Met U.S. Presidents

The time Herman Melville shook hands with Abraham Lincoln
 
In 1861, Melville headed to Washington to try and land a job in Lincoln’s administration. He met with senators and saw the sights, including the still-unfinished Washington Monument. But the thing he remembered most was an evening at the White House. It was, Melville wrote to his wife, “a great crowd and a brilliant scene”—beautiful flower arrangements, music from a full band, and hundreds of attendees in lavish dress. It took Lincoln more than an hour to shake every hand. “Of course I was one of the shakers,” Melville admitted. “Old Abe is much better looking than I expected, and younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood.”

The time Edith Wharton dined with Teddy Roosevelt
 
Soon after Roosevelt became president, in 1901, he invited Edith Wharton to have lunch with him at the White House. (Wharton and Roosevelt had moved in the same Manhattan circles, and he admired her fiction.) When she entered the president’s new home, the author heard him roar happily: “Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House someone to whom I can quote The Hunting of the Snark without being asked what I mean!” Roosevelt explained that no one in his administration knew Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to say nothing of Lewis Carroll’s lesser works. He’d tried joking with a cabinet secretary, saying, “Mr. Secretary, what I say three times is true.” All he got in response was groveling. “Mr. President,” the secretary replied, “it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity.”

The time Robert Lowell partied with JFK
 
John and Jackie Kennedy cared deeply about promoting culture—and about promoting the image of them promoting culture. The first couple threw sumptuous, salon-like parties in the White House, including one in 1962 that was attended by Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Lowell, among other authors. A few weeks later, Lowell admitted in a letter to Edmund Wilson, who was also at the event, that the whole thing felt fraudulent. “Everyone there seemed addled with adulation at having been invited,” Lowell wrote. “It was all good fun but next morning you read that the president . . . might have invaded Cuba again.” Lowell believed that the Kennedys’ party had been a distraction—that America’s authors should have known better. “We should be windows,” he wrote, “not window-dressing.”
 
The time Toni Morrison got a call from Barack Obama
 
One day, in 2007, Toni Morrison’s phone rang. It was a long-shot presidential candidate named Barack Obama. While Obama hoped Morrison would endorse him in the primary, they started by talking books. “He began to talk to me about one of the books I had written, Song of Solomon, and how it had meant a lot to him,” Morrison said. The novelist had also read Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father, and left it impressed. “I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect,” she said. Morrison eventually decided to write an open letter endorsing Obama—the first time in her career that she had endorsed a presidential candidate. And yet when she reflected on that phone call, many months later, it was the literary discussion that stuck with her. “We were writers,” Morrison said, “talking on the phone.”