Product Description

Abraham Lincoln has achieved an unrivaled preeminence in American history, culture, and myth. Here, for the bicentennial of his birth, Lincoln and his enduring legacy are the focus of nearly 100 major authors and important historical figures from his time to the present. Edited by celebrated Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, this collection gathers fascinating writing from a variety of genres to illuminate the Lincoln we know and revere. It enables readers to rediscover Lincoln anew through the eyes of some of our greatest writers, including Winston Churchill, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, U. S. Grant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Victor Hugo, Henrik Ibsen, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Booker T. Washington, H. G. Wells, Walt Whitman, Garry Wills, and many others. The Lincoln Anthology includes illustrations and a detailed chronology of Lincoln’s life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154213 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 964 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781598530339
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
This hefty Library of America anthology, edited by Lincoln scholar Holzer (co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission), is a solid compilation of work on Abraham Lincoln from a diverse selection of writers in various genres, celebrating his extensive legacy and providing insight from a number of angles and time periods. From William Cullen Bryant's introduction of the little-known Illinois Republican at Cooper Union in Manhattan to Barack Obama's 2007 presidential candidacy announcement (made on Lincoln's birthday at Springfield's Old State Capitol, where Lincoln delivered his "House Divided" speech), Holzer follows the president's legacy through marquee names like Whitman, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Marx, Churchill and Doctorow. Including a helpful index and a chronology of Lincoln's life, this voluminous, thorough collection will keep Lincoln fans reading well past the beloved president's upcoming bicentennial.
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From Booklist
For this collection of more than 100 selections from writings about Lincoln, anthologist Holzer largely avoids history and biography as such and concentrates on imaginative literature. Whether by poet, dramatist, or novelist, works in the genre tend to polarize into mythology or iconoclasm about the Lincoln image. Holzer’s introduction to each piece fits it into the historical fluctuations in Lincoln’s reputation, against the periodic exaltation of which critic Edmund Wilson, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, and novelist Gore Vidal all rebelled. Their excerpts contrast with the wealth of laudatory material that Holzer presents, which includes verse by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, lyrics of songs, acts and scenes from plays and screenplays, and passages from historical fiction. Including memorial addresses and historical essays, Holzer’s volume faithfully represents the range of feelings and meanings writers from 1860 to the present have drawn from the Lincoln story. This title is offered both separately and in a three-volume boxed set, The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (9781598530360, $99.95), which includes the two-volume Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings (1989), edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. --Gilbert Taylor

Review

“This extraordinary anthology contains the best and most evocative words written about Abraham Lincoln over the last two centuries, skillfully edited by Harold Holzer.”
—James M. McPherson, author of Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
“So prodigious were Abraham Lincoln’s talents, so capacious the American imagination’s embrace of him, that each successive generation of Americans has reinvented his image to serve its own needs and times. No anthology before this one has charted that curious process with more erudition, elegance, and grace.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
“A thrilling book. Here at last is the living portrait of Lincoln that has eluded photographers and painters for 200 years.”
—Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

Customer Reviews

"O captain, my captain...."
I was made aware of this title through the recent Lincoln PBS special with Sam Waterson and Harold Holzer. The readings on the show made me want to hear them again, and they are all here in this very good collection. Particularly interesting is the poem by Melville, who met Lincoln and asked for an ambassadorship to Florence, Italy, which he didn't get. Also of interest is the Nathanael Hawthorne description upon first meeting Lincoln. And of course, the poems of Walt Whitman are forever poignant. Lincoln's appeal to poets, writers, and the world was such because he himself was something of a poet and loved Shakespeare and all literature.
This is a fine collection. It should be read in a historical context, divorced from the political struggles we endure today.

Library of America's second Lincoln book blunder
Oh, this book was terrible! No joke, just atrocious! It was killing me to go through it.
Almost fifty years since the last worthy anthology of writings on Lincoln (LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR, ed. by Courtlandt Canby, 1960), I was really looking forward to this work, but it falls short of even minimal expectations.
Whereas Canby and Paul Angle before him (THE LINCOLN READER, 1947) produced outstanding anthologies by skillfully arranging and editing contemporary and modern book passages outlining and analyzing Lincoln's life and Presidency, this book is mostly poems, odes, speeches and other uninformative and unsubstantial verse simply printed in order of their publication. What do such writings tell us about Lincoln's life or the great decisions that constitute his legacy, as the book's subtitle states? How could an essay like Tom Taylor's "Lincoln Foully Assassinated" which doesn't even mention John Wilkes Booth and his actual deed be included? Unbelievable! Or John Greenleaf Whittier's "The Emancipation Group" with nothing about the evolution of the Emancipation Proclamation and its advocates?! Just more lyrics and fluff. Where are the writings of late scholars like James Ford Rhodes, Alan Nevins or James G. Randall? Or the great modern historians like David Donald, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or James McPherson?
It wasn't enough for the Library of America to replace the late dean of Lincoln scholars Don Fehrenbacher's introduction to its LINCOLN SPEECHES AND WRITINGS with Gore Vidal, now they must insult serious students again with another bow to verse over scholarship. There is SOME good, solid history by Lincoln secretaries Nicolay & Hay, Winston Churchill, and Shelby Foote, and the life chronology at the end is better than most. But these hardly justify $40 for over 800 pages of fluff. By far, this book is more suited to the literature section, not biography or history.

On Lincoln
While I consider this anthology an essential purchase for anyone with a bookshelf devoted to Abraham Lincoln, it does contain certain selections I found unworthy. These were mainly works of historical fiction by modern (but not great) writers including Irving Stone, Gore Vidal, William Safire and--especially--Adam Braver.

On the larger positive side, this volume gives the reader the handy opportunity to read important thoughts about Mr. Lincoln by Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Barzun and many others.

While I admire the editor Harold Holzer, I suspect this one-time aide to Gov. Mario Cuomo (a former New York political leader who has an excellent piece rightfully included by Mr. Holzer in this anthology) has stacked the deck somewhat in favor of selections and commentary that support the attempted capture of Mr. Lincoln's legacy by the modern Democratic Party.