A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this “masterful” (The Economist) biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president.

“An utterly incandescent study of one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

In development as the Netflix series Kennedy, starring Michael Fassbender

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE • NAMED THE TIMES’ BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR

By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history. And while hagiographic portrayals of his dazzling charisma, reports of his extramarital affairs, and disagreements over his political legacy have come and gone in the decades since his untimely death, these accounts all fail to capture the full person.

Beckoned by this gap in our historical knowledge, Fredrik Logevall has spent much of the last decade on a sweeping two-volume biography that properly contextualizes Kennedy amid the roiling American Century. This volume spans the first thirty-nine years of JFK’s life to reveal his early relationships, his formative experiences during World War II, his ideas, his writings, and his political aspirations.

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 is a sweeping history of the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as well as the clearest portrait we have of this enigmatic American icon.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Sunday Times (London), New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, Kirkus Reviews