This Is My Story.

This Is My Story (1937) is the first of Eleanor Roosevelt's three autobiographical volumes and one of the most commercially successful memoirs produced by a First Lady in the history of American publishing. Written in 1936 and serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal — for which the editors paid $75,000 for the rights — the book's first installment alone sold 250,000 copies, prompting the journal's editors to write that they had made "the exciting discovery that Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography was read, in effect, by everyone — in government, parlors, and slums." The volume traces Roosevelt's life from a lonely and difficult childhood — orphaned young and raised under the severe scrutiny of a mother who found her plain and awkward — through her marriage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, her discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer, and her consequential decision to forge an independent political identity, concluding with the Democratic National Convention of 1924. Writing in the New York Times, Katharine Woods praised the book as "the frank, unaffected, courageous story of an American woman's life, told in generosity, effectiveness and perception, and with the kind of objectivity which bespeaks the absence of any vanity, self-complacence or pettiness," while Lloyd Morris in The North American Review noted that it received almost unanimous praise from the press.