Author of “Dear George, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love,” Mary Calvi offers readers another fascinating fictional novel crafted from primary source material.
“If a Poem Could Live and Breathe,” which was released earlier this year, is at once a historical novel and a romance novel centered on young Theodore Roosevelt and his first love, Alice Hathaway Lee.
For Calvi, discovering original love letters between Roosevelt and Lee stored primarily at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, was illuminating and transforming. It was an opportunity to share their voices—voices, for Calvi that needed to be heard for their poignancy, beauty, and perhaps pivotal design in molding the mind and heart of the nation’s 26th president of the United States….