Abstract
This Article discusses book-length accounts of real negotiations and their value for understanding the process of negotiation. We focus much attention on an excellent example, Thirteen Days in September by Lawrence Wright, which is a rich account of the negotiation in 1978 involving US President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. We are interested in the usefulness and challenges of using such detailed accounts of historical negotiations to build theory. We find it significant that book length detailed accounts of single negotiations have not been on any of the many negotiation syllabi we had composed or read, nor do they, in our memory, show up as footnotes in our ever-blooming negotiation scholarship.