Every year we celebrate the birth of the land of the free and the home of the brave with fireworks, fanfare, and fervent speeches painted in red, white, and blue. We sing the national anthem with our hands on our hearts. Most of all, we remember the stories of independence infused with names like Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington. We also salute those who ardently protected liberty over the last 249 years. One of those guardians was James Earl Carter, Jr.

Jimmy Carter was born in 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia. He attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Tech, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. He became a Navy submariner, serving in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he did graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.

When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and his wife, Rosalynn, operated Carter’s Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. He served on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. In 1962, he won election to the Georgia Senate. He was elected Georgia’s governor in 1971, and elected U.S. President in 1976, exactly 200 years from the birth of the country.

As president, Carter pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and negotiated major foreign policy agreements, including the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and established diplomatic relations with China. The later years of his presidency were marked by several foreign policy crises, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1980 Olympics boycott, and the fallout of the Iran hostage crisis, and 1979 oil crisis. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

Carter was the author of thirty-two books, all national bestsellers. Carter wrote mostly nonfiction, on everything from war and peace to faith, personal reflections on his childhood and aging, and even fishing. He also wrote a children’s book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, illustrated by his daughter, Amy, and a novel, The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War. In 1982, he became University Distinguished Professor at Emory University.

“Of all our modern Presidents, Jimmy Carter was America’s most protean author,” wrote his publisher, Jonathan Karp, CEO of Simon & Schuster. “In all of his books, he maintained a voice of great integrity and intellectual honesty.” Carter was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2006.