| Title | : | Lincoln: The Man |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0962384267 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780962384264 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 498 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1931 |
Written by Edgar Lee Masters, the famous author of Spoon River Anthology (who was a native of Illinois), the scholarship in this book was able to withstand the most vicious attacks. In fact, as you will learn from the new introduction, the U.S. Congress actually attempted to ban Lincoln: The Man, which was offered to the public only once in a brief first edition.
Now the Foundation for American Education has produced a new edition of Lincoln: The Man for the first time in over half a century, with a new introduction that puts it all into perspective. Lincoln: The Man is both a collector's item and a book that must be read by anyone who wants to understand the causes of the War and the true nature of Lincoln's legacy (as well as by readers who admire the unique literary gifts of Edgar Lee Masters).
Included in this new edition is a collection of rare photographs and the text of reviews not published since the 1930s, by H.L. Mencken, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and others.
"Seldom have I read so brilliant a picture of the decay of the old American spirit ... The writing here is so eloquent as to be genuinely moving ... The American people, North and South, went into the war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... And what they thus lost they have never got back." — H.L. Mencken
"An intensely interesting, arresting, challenging, book..." — Claude Bowers
"...the Lincoln myth is definitely a bad myth, and Mr. Masters deserves credit for shattering it..." — Andrew Nelson Lytle
Lincoln: The Man Reviews
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Edgar Lee Masters has a hard-on for Stephen Douglas that is so creepy and weird, it’s actually distracting. He also has the most nonsensical analysis of the situation pre-Civil War, talking about slavery as if it wasn’t actually that bad and that the concern shouldn’t be a moral one, but a legal/political one. On the other hand he argues that Lincoln was at once a mediocre, lazy and ignorant man and a cynical, Machiavellian, grand strategist on the other.
This book is good to understand the psyche of ideological neo-confederacy that permeates the southern, masculine, white American right wing.
Read this book critically, it’s good for understanding how the other side thinks about the same historical event, using the same known historical facts. -
It would be unfair to judge this portrait of Lincoln and the America he reformed against the standards of unbiased scholarship or political prudence. Here we encounter a moral (or what comes out to the same thing, an aesthetic) protest against the grotesquerie of the Second Founding as seen by a poet whose Muse was the First.
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Masters's biography of Abraham Lincoln is strongly biased against Lincoln because (as the book clearly reveals) Masters was a defender of slavery. Masters grotesquely called abolitionists opponents of liberty. He compared abolitionism to prohibition, disregarding the fact that a drunkard only directly harms himself while a slave-owner directly harms his slaves. Despite its bias, this book may provide a useful counterbalance to the innumerable hagiographies of Lincoln that proliferated in his time (and still often appear today in USA) if read critically.
