life:

On February 6, 2011, Ronald Reagan — actor, governor, president, and, eventually, political icon — would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Here, an excerpt from LIFE’s new book, Ronald Reagan at 100, an expanded edition of the classic photo-biography. The book features more than 150 photographs — some of them rare — of Reagan, as well as an insightful forward by Joe Klein, Time magazine’s editor-at-large. Klein writes about Reagan’s self-invention and mastery of American symbolism, clearly seen in many of the photos that follow. There was, Klein writes, “more to the invention than just a magisterial aw-shucks demeanor…The philosophy he settled on was based in a yearning for an America that probably never was — the small-town life he might have lived with a more stable father — but it had the virtue of being a common American dream…”

Ronald Reagan at 100