Lincoln's Selected Writings

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States and the author of several seminal speeches and writings, including the Gettysburg Address. He died in 1865. David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography; John Brown, Abolitionist; Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville; Mightier Than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Walt Whitman; George Lippard; and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Reynolds is the editor or coeditor of seven books, including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The 150th Anniversary Edition, A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Splendid Edition, and George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

"David Reynolds masterfully presents the most broad-ranging and revealing array of documents by or about Lincoln to appear in a single volume." -- Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis "Here are the essential words of our most important President, edited by one of the leading scholars of nineteenth-century America. The annotations, the views of Lincoln's contemporaries, and the essays by modern commentators are all that we could hope for, offering profound insight on every page." -- Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond "David Reynolds' excellent selection from Abraham Lincoln's writings helps us take the full measure of Lincoln's principled cunning as well as his eloquence. Together with excerpts from contemporary and classic scholarship, it is now the best starting point for serious study of Lincoln the man as well as the politician and president." -- Sean Wilentz, Princeton University "Indispensable: a selection of Lincoln's letters, speeches, proclamations and eulogies that captures his distinctive voice in all its extraordinary flexibility. And also included in this fine volume is Reynolds' perspicacious, broad-ranged collection of responses to Lincoln by his contemporaries as well as by present-day historians and authors. A wonderful assortment, singular and significant." -- Brenda Wineapple, author of Ecstatic Nation: Cris "This expansive but carefully curated array of writings by and about Abraham Lincoln provides readers with an excellent source from which to draw in seeking to come to grips with the most eloquent and philosophically serious President Americans have had thus far." -- Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School