The appearance of so many celebrity bios and tell-alls prompts me to quote Homer Simpson: “Celebrities - is there anything they don’t know?” I would say that some don’t know enough to keep their yappers shut during election year, but maybe that’s just me.
Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
The most literary of the U.S. Presidents, the autodidact Abraham Lincoln, an enthusiast of Byron, Burns, and Shakespeare, mastered writing as a means of communicating thought and expression, using his dedication to language to give himself credibility as lawyer, legislator, public figure, and president. In Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan, author of several biographies, including The Singular Mark Twain, focuses on the elements that shaped the 16th president’s mental and imaginative world, and considers how his use of language molded his identity, relationships, and career. Whether composing speeches, legal arguments, or love letters, Lincoln — with straightforward views on love, liberty and human nature shaped by his reading and knowledge of literature — came to prize clear, common speech as vital to expressing moral vision and democratic principles. His aptitude for storytelling and conveying illuminating detail ensured that his listeners and readers would grasp his argument, while his purpose, says Kaplan, was to persuade rather than to stir emotion.
Moreover, Lincoln explores Lincoln's life through his use of language as a vehicle for complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment. Kaplan looks at childhood exercises; early political speeches and circulars; letters to friends; attempts at poetry; eulogies for Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay; and addresses to Congress. The author demonstrates how Lincoln brought elements of his own personality — melancholy and humor, unpretentious language and intellectual intensity — to prose and 19th century-style "speechifying" that came to be defined as quintessentially American.
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