Writer Michael Patrick F. Smith
Lessons in Self-Invention and Reinvention from Theodore Roosevelt
after losing his mother to typhoid fever and his wife to kidney failure on the same day that his first daughter was born—marked an X in his journal and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”
he’d killed his first buffalo, dancing around the felled beast “like an Indian war‑chief, whooping and shrieking” in excitement at his victory. As he would later recall, “It was here that the romance of my life began.”

Lessons in Self-Invention and Reinvention from Theodore Roosevelt
In 1884, the grieving 25‑year‑old New York State Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt—after losing his mother to typhoid fever and his wife to kidney failure on the same day that his first daughter was b…