Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma.
One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year A
Washington Post Notable Book A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus
Reviews Best Book of 2020
Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham
Lincoln Institute Book Award
"A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his
historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill
out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's
biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy
and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural--'With malice
toward none; with charity for all'--come from? This big, wonderful book
provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything
else, about Lincoln." --Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal
From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a
revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the
making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age
David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural
biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth
century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham
Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is
the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American
life in the decades before the Civil War.
It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time,
with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's
contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson,
Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would
emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his
father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was
linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring
theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance
between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an
unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for
wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as
his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him
apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his
entrance into politics.
No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no
exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man
who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of
things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he
moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed
toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates,
of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his
beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural
knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union,
transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords
of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."
Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his
times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an
extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that
astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The
measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
