The former president and Nobel Peace Prize—winner has already written several books for Simon & Schuster, including his memorable An Hour Before Daylight, and now he is turning his hand to fiction. A novel, believed to be the first ever written by a U.S. chief executive, is on the way for publication late this fall. It's called The Hornet's Nest and will be a historical novel showing how some of the colonies in the South fared during the Revolutionary War—in which one of Carter's own ancestors was involved. He will use contemporary diaries of combatants as well as the work of historians of the war to put his mixture of fictional and real-life characters in believable situations. S&S publisher David Rosenthal signed the book for world rights, including first serial, with Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit, and the book will be co-edited by the high-powered team of Michael Korda and Alice Mayhew.