WRITING THE LIFE OF RONALD REAGAN: AN IMPOSSIBLE MISSION?

Few American academics have written biographies of Ronald Reagan. The field remains wide open and is dominated by conservative hagiographers, the political reporter Lou Cannon, and an official biographer, Edmund Morris, who channeled his writer’s block into fiction. This article analyzes how a French Reagan scholar had to navigate such complex sources to write an academic biography of the fortieth president of the United States.