Curtis Roosevelt

Curtis Roosevelt (né Dall; April 19, 1930 – September 26, 2016) was an American writer. Roosevelt was the son of Anna Roosevelt and her first husband, Curtis Bean Dall. He was the eldest grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Personal life

Curtis Roosevelt Dall was born on April 19, 1930, in New York City. When he was three, Curtis, his sister Eleanor (born 1927), and his mother moved into the White House, where they lived until his mother remarried in 1935. Newspaper articles frequently referred to the children by their nicknames, "Buzzie" and "Sistie." After his parents' 1934 divorce, his mother married journalist Clarence John Boettiger in 1935. His younger half-brother, John, was born in 1939.

Roosevelt graduated from Northwestern Military and Naval Academy in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He later attended Loyola University in Los Angeles. In 1985, he married Marina Ayers Jones. He had one grandson, Julianna's son Nicholas Roosevelt. Roosevelt obtained his master's degree from the School of Government and Public Law at Columbia University.

From 1983 to 1986, Roosevelt served as principal at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England. He served as a visiting professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2010. In 1987, he and his wife Marina moved to Deia, Mallorca, where Roosevelt devoted himself to pottery, some of his work being exhibited in a Palma gallery. He also occasionally wrote on American politics for El Mundo in Spain.

Roosevelt's book Too Close to the Sun: Growing up in the Shadow of my Grandparents Franklin and Eleanor was published in 2008 and led to a series of radio and television appearances by the author. In 2012, the book was translated and published in France.

The Roosevelts lived in a small village in the south of France, where Marina served on the municipal council. He lectured at Lille University and regularly appeared on French television. He also wrote occasionally for Le Figaro, the International Herald Tribune and had articles in La Tribune, France-Amerique, Marianne and the Commune de la Commune. Because of his connection to his famous family, Roosevelt was often consulted by the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York and the National Park Service for comments on library exhibits and historic homes Springwood and Val-Kill. Early in 2016 he published his last book, a collection of essays about the Roosevelt family in which he had grown, Upstairs at the Roosevelts': Growing Up with Franklin and Eleanor.

Roosevelt died on September 26, 2016, due to a heart attack, in Saint-Bonnet-du-Gard at the age of 86.