Abraham Lincoln Biography

Lincoln : Biography of America's Sixteenth President

This fully rounded biography of America's sixteenth President is the product of Donald's half-century of study of Abraham Lincoln and his times. In preparing it, David Herbert Donald has drawn more extensively than any previous writer on Abraham Lincoln's personal papers and those of his contemporaries, and he has taken full advantage of the voluminous newly discovered records of Abraham Lincoln's legal practice.
David Herbert Donald presents his findings with the same literary skill and psychological understanding exhibited in his previous biographies, which have received two Pulitzer Prizes.

Development Lincoln's Character

Much more than a political biography, Donald's Lincoln reveals the development of the future President's character and shows how his private life helped to shape his public career. In Donald's skillful hands, Abraham Lincoln emerges as a youthful, vigorous President. One of the youngest men ever to occupy the White House, Abraham Lincoln was also the husband of an even younger wife and the father of boisterous children.

Politics Disrupted Family Life

We witness how Lincoln's absorption with politics disrupted his family life, and how his often tumultuous marriage affected his political career. And we see a man renowned for his storytelling and his often sidesplitting humor lapse into the periods of deep melancholy to which he was prone, not only during the dark days of the Civil War but throughout his life.
David Herbert Donald's strikingly original portrait of Abraham Lincoln depicts a man who was basically passive by nature, who confessed that he did not control events but events had controlled him. Yet coupled with that fatalism was an unbounded ambition that drove him to take enormous political risks and enabled him to overcome repeated defeats. David Herbert Donald shows that Abraham Lincoln was a master of ambiguity and expediency - but he also stresses that Abraham Lincoln was a great moral leader, inflexibly opposed to slavery and absolutely committed to preserving the Union.

Lincoln by David Herbert Donald
ISBN: 068482535X