Curwen best biography of abraham lincoln

No figure looms over the Civil War as Abraham Lincoln does, and some 17,000 books—from “spiritual biographies” to business management guides—have been published to attest to the fact.

The greatest of these were written by Lincoln himself: I mean the countless collections of his speeches, notes, and letters that have appeared regularly and redundantly since 1865.

But the vast majority of lesser books can be traced back to a single volume.

Biblical scholars like to talk about “Q,” a long-vanished compilation of the sayings and stories of Jesus that the Gospel writers evidently used as source material in composing their separate accounts. Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889) is the Q of Lincoln literature, the wellspring of much of what we know, or think we know, about Lincoln’s character and pre-presidential life.

It is a rambling, eccentric, ill-proportioned, and oddly beautiful biography, written by Lincoln’s final