This definitive, single-volume edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography delivers “a Lincoln whom no other man . . . could have given us” (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).
Celebrated for his vivid depictions of the nineteenth-century American Midwest, Carl Sandburg brings unique insight to the life of Abraham Lincoln in this distinguished biography. He captures both the man who grew up on the Indiana prairie and the president who held the country together through the turbulence and tragedy of the Civil War.
Based on a lifetime of research, Sandburg’s biographywas originally published as a monumental, six-volume study. The author later distilled the work down to this single-volume edition that is considered by many to be his greatest work of nonfiction.
Carl Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as “a major figure in contemporary literature,” especially for his volumes of collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed “unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life,” and, upon his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson said about the writer: “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.”