Carter honoring ‘Miss Lillian’ in book

Former President Jimmy Carter, who already has a book coming out this fall about his post-White House years, is working on a memoir about his mother, Lillian, to be published next spring by Simon & Schuster.

“Jimmy Carter has inspired millions. It’s a great opportunity to meet the woman who inspired him,” David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, said Thursday in a statement.

The Lillian Carter book, currently untitled, is a “loving, admiring, wry homage” to the activist and former Peace Corps volunteer widely known as the down-to-earth “Miss Lillian.” According to Simon & Schuster, former President Carter will write about how his mother, who died in 1983, “ignored the mores and prejudices of the racially segregated South of the Great Depression years” and went on to become a celebrity.

“She happened to attend the first major league baseball game in which Jackie Robinson, from Cairo, Ga., played, [and] was a favored guest on television talk shows, usually able to ‘steal the microphone’ from hosts such as Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite,” the publisher says.

“Jimmy Carter’s mother emerges from this portrait as redoubtable, generous and forward-looking. He ascribes to her the inspiration for his own life’s work of commitment and faith.”