New Insights into the Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Each year numerous books are published on Abraham Lincoln. Recently two outstanding contributions have been made, one by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (FDR and WWII, No Ordinary Time) , Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and the other by Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

The Week of 4 November 2005 (p. 30) carries a brief column that notes the difficulties Goodwin has weathered because of her admission of plagiarism of portion of a recent book. Thomas Mallon, author of Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), notes in The Atlantic Monthly (November 2005 and available online through InfoTrac OneFile http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/eai.html) that Goodwin found solace in Lincoln’s philosophy: “His whole philosophy was not to waste precious energies on recriminations about the past.” From the article: "I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress," Lincoln wrote at the end of 1862 to the daughter of a friend whom been killed in battle. His consolations, his urgings, his epistolary loss-cuttings, have been stacked and shelved around Goodwin, nearly walling her in, for years now. When I sat with her in Concord last summer, she showed me, one by one, copies of the pictures that would go into the book, clearly eager to push it over the finish line, just as clearly hesitant to let it go. Abraham Lincoln is a subject to which she's done justice, and he is a subject she needed more than she first knew.”

Goodwin’s book focuses on Lincoln’s relationship with his cabinet. Her Lincoln is not gloomy or depressed and she says that she “came to know and love” him. Goodwin recently spoke about this book and more on C-Span’s Book TV for three hours. Listen to and see the conversation at http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=6146&schedID=384. National Public radio also covered the book, hear the program at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4994044 and http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989622.

Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness was also explored by a National Public Radio program, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4976127. From the book: “In three key criteria -- the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset -- the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. Yet Lincoln's case is perfect, too, in a very different sense: it forces us to reckon with the limits of diagnostic categories and raises fundamental questions about the nature of illness and health.”