How cowriting a book threatened Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s marriage

NEW YORK — No ex-president had a more prolific and diverse publishing career than Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100.

His more than two dozen books included nonfiction, poetry, fiction, religious meditations, and a children’s story. His memoir An Hour Before Daylight was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, while his 2006 best-seller Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid stirred a fierce debate by likening Israel’s policies in the West Bank to the brutal South African system of racial segregation.

» READ MORE: Jimmy Carter, tireless humanitarian admired as model ex-president, has died at 100

And just before his 100th birthday, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation honored him with a lifetime achievement award for how he wielded “the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.”

In one recent work, A Full Life, Carter observed that he “enjoyed writing” and that his books “provided a much-needed source of income.” But some projects were easier than others.

Everything to Gain, a 1987 collaboration with his wife, Rosalynn, turned into the “worst threat we ever experienced in our marriage,” an intractable standoff for the facilitator of the Camp David accords and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

According to Carter, Rosalynn was a meticulous author who considered “the resulting sentences as though they have come down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone.” Their memories differed on various events and they fell into “constant arguments.” They were ready to abandon the book and return the advance, until their editor persuaded them to simply divide any disputed passages between them.

“In the book, each of these paragraphs is identified by a ‘J’ or an ‘R,’ and our marriage survived,” he wrote.

» READ MORE: How Jimmy Carter helped build 4,390 homes with Habitat for Humanity

Here is a partial list of books by Carter: