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List Price: $27.95Amazon.com's Price: $18.45 You Save: $9.50 (34%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.7092
EAN: 9780060773342
ISBN: 0060773340
Label: Harper
Manufacturer: Harper
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: November 01, 2008
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: October 28, 2008
Studio: Harper
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
For Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered. In Lincoln, acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan explores the life of America's sixteenth president through his use of language as a vehicle both to express complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment. Like the other great canonical writers of American literature—a status he is gradually attaining—Lincoln had a literary career that is inseparable from his life story. An admirer and avid reader of Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Old Testament, Lincoln was the most literary of our presidents. His views on love, liberty, and human nature were shaped by his reading and knowledge of literature.
Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his audience with equal and enduring effectiveness. Kaplan focuses on the elements that shaped Lincoln's mental and imaginative world; how his writings molded his identity, relationships, and career; and how they simultaneously generated both the distinctive political figure he became and the public discourse of the nation. This unique account of Lincoln's life and career highlights the shortcomings of the modern presidency, reminding us, through Lincoln's legacy and appreciation for language, that the careful and honest use of words is a necessity for successful democracy.
Illuminating and engrossing, Lincoln brilliantly chronicles Abraham Lincoln's genius with language.
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
Professor Kaplan does an excellent job of reconstructing the likely influences upon Lincoln as a developing writer and thinker.
Lincoln was a very guarded and private man, and so much of the evidence mined by Kaplan is necessarily circumstantial. In particular, he draws many inferences about Lincoln's private beliefs from authors he likely carefully read as a youth, such as Burns, Byron and Shakespeare. Professor Kaplan's expertise in literature and history makes him well suited to this task. And many of the inferences he draws do seem very plausible.
Still, I give the book only 4 starts rather than 5, because it seems that Professor Kaplan gets carried away at times with his speculations about Lincoln's thought life, projecting greater certainty than the circumstantial evidence would warrant, and downplaying contrary evidence.
For example, Professor Kaplan seems anxious to establish that Lincoln did not believe in the afterlife. He returns ... Read More
Rating:  -
Jonathan Yardley, critic for the WASHINGTON POST, called this latest book about our greatest president Abraham Lincoln "the book of the year." Perhaps I was expecting too much from such a superlative recommendation, but I ultimately found the book disappointing. Mr. Kaplan mixes biography and literary criticism, a difficult task at best. I would have preferred to see less biography and analysis and more of Lincoln's actual writing so I could make my own conclusions from reading the actual prose. And while the author writes at length about some of the sixteenth president's earlier less-known speeches, he says precious little about what many scholars consider Lincoln's crowning achievements in literature, his Second Inaugural Address and his Gettysburg Address-- a most obvious flaw.
Finally Kaplan ends his narrative abruptly with the following: "Four days later his [Lincoln's] ability to exercise his gift for language and his mastery of words on this and all other subjects ended."
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Rating:  -
BOOK REVIEW: Abe Lincoln: Writer Extraordinaire
By David M. Kinchen
Abraham Lincoln was a rising star in the new Republican Party when he was invited in August 1859 to speak at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society fair in Milwaukee at the end of September. He accepted the offer despite a busy court schedule, relates Fred Kaplan in "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer" (HarperCollins, 416 pages, $27.95).
Kaplan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College in New York City, devotes more space in his book to this speech than he does to more famous literary efforts by Lincoln, including the Gettysburg Address. Using perhaps the best analytical mind of any of our presidents, Lincoln presented a powerful but subtle argument for freedom at a time when the nation was about to be torn asunder over slavery. To put the speech into its historical context, John Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West ... Read More
Rating: -
Kaplan has a distinct purpose of tracing the literary influences on Lincoln and the consequent development of Lincoln as a writer. He makes the case that Lincoln's faith in reason and the pursuasive use of the written word were the source of his political effectiveness and his greatest legacy.
Rating:  -
I have become very skeptical of "historical" works that are written today as they are biased and authors tend to change history or ignore it. I have read several books that are from my grandfather's library (150+ books) on Lincoln and there is a greater influence of the Bible than discussed in this book. For example, "Just as he was without the opportunity of regular attendance up the day-school, so he was also without the opportunity of attendance upon Sunday-school and upon church and Bible class. And yet there was no book to which he devoted so much time, study, analysis and application of its great truths as he did to the Bible. As Herndon (his former law partner) has well said: "This book was nearly always at his elbow." - The Voice of Lincoln, New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920
This is a secular progressive trying to skew a historical president into liberal agenda. Sorry, he didn't think like you and Lincoln didn't "probably regarded John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" ... Read More
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