NEW YORK, March 22 (UPI) -- Chats between Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch and former U.S. President Bill Clinton will become a book Simon & Schuster plans to publish in 2008.
Tentatively titled "Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes," the book will be based on 80 tapes' worth of conversation between Clinton and Taylor, friends for 40 years, the New York Times said.
Noting it was neither a biography or historical account, Branch said the book was "what it was like to live through it that way, sitting alone with him, talking about the presidency as he saw it, right in the moment."
Branch said Clinton's office called in 1992, asking if he would meet with the president-elect. Clinton suggested that his appointees would not keep vivid enough records and agreed to regular recorded "diary sessions," Branch said.
Branch said Clinton suggested that the historian take advantage of the material at his disposal.
"While we were in the middle of it, he said, 'You know, one day you might want to write a memoir about this,'" Branch said.
Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for "America in the King Years, 1954-1968," a trilogy on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
