Presidential Memoirs Don’t Always Take This Long to Write

The wait is over for the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, “A Promised Land,” which came out on Tuesday.

But as a slew of articles calling the book’s arrival “long-awaited” and “highly anticipated” suggest, it was a considerable wait. Obama took three years and 10 months to publish — longer than any other American president in the last century.

The chart below shows the history. With the exception of presidents who died in office and George H.W. Bush, who never wrote a standard presidential memoir, no modern president has taken as long to publish after leaving the White House.