Six more books on Lincoln

Among the stacks, some titles stand out.

In Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, English professor emeritus Fred Kaplan seeks the roots of the president’s truly timeless prose. “Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his contemporary audience or posterity with equal and enduring effectiveness,” Kaplan writes.

Consider a November morning in 1863, as an esteemed orator gave a speech at the dedication of a military cemetery in Pennsylvania. He finished two hours and 13,607 words later. The main attraction now complete, the audience waited for another speaker to make a few remarks. And few they were. In just 10 sentences, the president of the United States paid tribute to those lost in war and spoke of a young nation that must not “perish from the earth.” The words, simple and unadorned, turned Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into a national touchstone.