If you attended Harvard College during the 1876–1877 school year, you would’ve likely noticed a wiry, mutton-chopped, brash, and impossibly energetic freshman named Theodore Roosevelt. If you then proceeded to befriend this young man, you would’ve soon noticed a paradox. On the one hand, his attention might appear to be hopelessly scattered, spread over what one classmate called an “amazing array of interests”—a list that biographer Edmund Morris catalogs to contain boxing, wrestling, body building, dance lessons, poetry readings, and the continuation of a lifelong obsession with naturalism
