No American ex-president had a more prolific and diverse publishing career than the late James “Jimmy” Earl Carter, who died December 29, 2024 at 100.

His more than two dozen books included non-fiction, 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.

And just before his 100th birthday, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation honoured 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, who predeceased him in 2023, turned into the “worst threat we ever experienced in our marriage”, an intractable stand-off 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.

The book, despite initial obstacles, ended up being a warm account of the Carters’ life after their years in the White House, in which they discussed their marriage and health, their work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, among other things.