Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a former peanut farmer whose vision of a "competent and compassionate" government propelled him into the White House, died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday, the Carter Center confirmed. He was 100, Fox News reports.

His specific cause of death was unclear. Carter's death followed the passing of his wife Rosalynn on November 19, 2023. She died at the age of 96 with her family by her side at the Carter home in Plains, just days after she had been admitted to hospice care.

The late former president himself had entered hospice care in February 2023. Carter survived for years after he had a "small mass" removed from his liver in early August 2015 and later that month announced he had liver cancer that had spread throughout his body.

The Carter family had a history of cancer and the former president lost his father, brother, and two sisters to pancreatic cancer. His mother had breast cancer, which later spread to her pancreas.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in Plains, a farming town, and Carter’s father was a farmer.

But Carter initially sought a path outside the dirt of Plains and, after attending the U.S. Naval Academy, he served as a submariner in the post-World War II navy, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant.

Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a fellow native of Plains, in 1946, the same year he graduated from the Academy.

After Carter’s father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and returned to his and Rosalynn’s roots in Plains. The young man took the lead at the family farm while Rosalynn operated a farm supply company in their small Georgia town.

It wasn’t long, however, before Carter again left the farm fields behind, this time beginning a career in politics that would land him the nation’s highest office in just 14 years.

Carter won election to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and, following a failed gubernatorial bid in 1966, he became the state’s governor in 1971.

Carter grew into a national Democratic Party leader and won the 1976 presidential election against President Gerald Ford.

While in the White House, Carter established full diplomatic relations with China and led the negotiation of a nuclear limitation treaty with the Soviet Union.