Delaware Today recommendations are objective, unbiased, and curated by the editorial team. If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission at no cost to you.
Dan Shortridge was a teenager—and the 1997 youth governor-elect of Delaware—when he first met then-Sen. Joe Biden, one of several home-state speakers at a 1996 national YMCA Youth Governors Conference in Washington, D.C.
“Senator Biden showed up for a 15-minute talk and [then] spoke for 45 minutes,” Shortridge remembers. “I was proud of him because he was the only guest speaker that the kids gave a standing ovation.”
Today, Shortridge, a historian and former journalist in Delaware, is the author of a new book on the 46th president: “Joe Biden’s Delaware,” published this past fall by the History Press, tells a story of perseverance against all odds. “[Joe] has suffered and succeeded and suffered again,” Shortridge writes. “He has been driven to his knees to mourn and to pray, and he has stood up and taken on our nation’s toughest battles. Delaware owes him a debt that cannot be repaid.”
When Shortridge committed to the project last spring, “The idea was to bring it out in time for the election, which we did,” the author says. But the situation changed considerably when Biden decided not to run for re-election. “Most of the books on Biden are about his work in Washington, but I wanted to focus on his time here in Delaware, going back to his years at Archmere Academy.”
The book relies more on personal memories and written sources, including newspaper articles, than it does on long interviews with the subject himself. What impressed Shortridge most during his research was “the centrality of religion in Biden’s life,” he says, “from going to Mass every day to relying on his faith through the many crises in his life.”
Find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Related: This Program Gives Delaware Students a Chance to Help Their Communities
