Profiles in Courage
By John F. Kennedy
Harper Perennial, 2000
(originally published in 1956)

April 24, 2002—St. Paul city and school offcials have chosen John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage as the book they'll encourage everyone in St. Paul to read. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for the book, which he wrote in 1955 while he was a U.S. senator.

"This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues—courage. "Grace under pressure," Ernest Hemingway defined it. And these are the stories of the pressures experienced by eight United States Senators and the grace with which they endured them..."

(from the publisher) During 1954-55, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. Senator, chose eight of his historical coleagues to profile for their acts of astounding integrity in the face of overwhelming opposition. These heroes include John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benson, and Robert A. Taft.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, Profiles in Courage resounds with timeless lessons on themost cherished of virtues and is a powerful reminder of the strength of the human spirit. It is, as Robert Kennedy states in the foreword, "not just stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us."

About the author
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, the second of the nine children of Joseph Patrick Kennedy and his wife Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was President of the United Sates from 1961 to 1963, the youngest man ever elected to the Oval Office and the first Roman Catholic president.