By Paul Carrier
Run a search for Abraham Lincoln on amazon.com and you'll turn up 80,357 entries (as of Sept. 30 2009). In some cases, this avalanche of words covers Lincoln's entire life. Other books zero in on his early years, his ethics, wartime leadership, political genius, wit, etc. Even his sexuality gets book-length treatment.
Which raises an obvious question. Could anyone possibly have anything new to say about our 16th president? Thanks to biographer Fred Kaplan, the answer is yes.
In Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Kaplan examines Lincoln's reading habits, his writing skills and the interplay between the two.
As Kaplan notes in his book, and as he reiterated when I heard him speak at a public forum recently, Lincoln used no speechwriters. He employed no editors to gussy up his prose.
In fact, Kaplan writes, "Lincoln is distinguished from every other president, with the exception of Jefferson, in that we can be certain that he wrote every word to which his name is attached."
Lincoln routinely put pen to paper throughout his life. And he did so, Kaplan argues, with the ease of a gifted writer who happened to be a politician, not the painful exertions of a politician struggling to become a writer. The man who appealed to "the better angels of our nature," is, Kaplan writes, the only president other than John Quincy Adams "for whom literature and life were inseparable."
As Kaplan explains, the self-taught Lincoln read deeply but not all that broadly, at least until he got to the White House, when access to the Library of Congess expanded his horizons. He loved poetry, for example, but was no fan of fiction.
While several works helped guide him as a writer, including the Bible and Aesop's Fables, Lincoln's strongest influences were William Shakespeare, the Scottish poet Robert Burns and the British poet Lord Byron.
Kaplan's scholarship and expertise are impressive. For my taste, though, his examination of Lincoln's writings is pedantic at times, making for some stodgy passages. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer is more successful, I think, in exploring Lincoln's lifelong devotion to reading, his passion for writing and his fondness for particular authors and genres.
A professor emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Kaplan, who now lives in Maine, also has written biographies of Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Henry James, Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle.
His Lincoln biography caught the public's eye in November 2008 when Barack Obama, then newly elected as president, was photographed carrying a copy of the book.
