William H. Herndon aspired to write a faithful portrait of his friend and law partner, Abraham Lincoln, based on his own observations and on hundreds of letters and interviews he had compiled for the purpose. Even more important, he was determined to present Lincoln as a man, rather than a saint, and to reveal things that the prevailing Victorian conventions said should be left out of the biography of a great national hero.

A variety of obstacles kept Herndon from writing his book, however, and not until he found a collaborator in Jesse W. Weik did the biography begin to take shape. It finally appeared in 1889, to decidedly mixed reviews. Though controversial from the outset, Herndon's Lincoln nonetheless established itself as a classic, and remains, as Don E. Fehrenbacher declared, "the most influential biography of Lincoln ever published." This new edition restores the original text, includes two chapters added in the revised (1892) edition, and traces the history of how Herndon and his collaborator, after many delays, produced one of the landmark biographies in American letters. Extensive annotation affords the reader a detailed look at the biography's sources.


About the Author
William H. Herndon (1818-1891) was Abraham Lincoln's law partner from 1844 until Lincoln became president in 1861. Jesse W. Weik (1857-1930) was an agent with the U.S. Pension Bureau and the primary writer of Herndon's Lincoln. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis are codirectors of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and the coeditors of Herndon's Informants, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

Reviews

"In this new volume, coeditors Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis have brought the landmark biography up to date with more than seventy years of Lincoln scholarship, thereby giving us the definitive modern edition of the work. . . . Wilson and Davis's new edition of Herndon's Lincoln will not only help scholars scrutinize the biography itself, but will also afford them the remarkable opportunity to see how the memory of one of America's greatest presidents was constructed."--Journal of the Early Republic

Will Guzman restores Lawrence A. Nixon to his proper place as one of the borderland's leading African American physicians and a pioneering opponent of Jim Crow.--Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History
More than a biography, Will Guzman's book offers a fresh window onto the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Guzman skillfully brings together African American history, western history, Chicana/o history, and the history of medicine into a fascinating and lively account of civil rights pioneer Lawrence Nixon.--Pablo Mitchell, author of Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880 -1920



Book Information
ISBN 9780252082078
Author William H. Herndon
Format Paperback
Page Count 528
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Weight(grams) 708g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 36mm