Abe and his mighty pen

Lincoln

The Biography of a Writer

Fred Kaplan

Harper: 406 pp., $27.95

Many aspirants to high office now turn out a self-serving autobiography or two, but few of these (mostly ghostwritten) books have proved memorable. There is, of course, "Dreams From My Father" by President-elect Barack Obama. There's also Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance" and "An Inconvenient Truth," which are minor classics of the environmental movement. Most campaign books, however, are forgotten even before the campaigns have ended. (I can remember Michael Dukakis' "Creating the Future" and Lamar Alexander's "We Know What to Do" suddenly appearing on bargain tables, remaindered for a pitiful $2.98.)

The post-presidential memoir is another all-too-familiar genre, giving us titles such as Richard Nixon's "Beyond Peace" and Bill Clinton's "My Life." The better ones offer insight into the executive mind, but hardly any of them are lasting; once their immediate moment has passed, the books are forgotten by everyone but historians and political scientists. Only a few American presidents have been great writers. Thomas Jefferson is remembered for the stirring prose of the Declaration of Independence, and Ulysses S. Grant's "Personal Memoirs" remain in print after 120 years. And Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are the only really literary presidents of the 20th century.

The most successful of all presidential scribblers, though, is Abraham Lincoln. In this lively biography, Fred Kaplan tells the now-familiar story of Lincoln's life, but with a twist: This is the life story of a great writer. "Lincoln," Kaplan writes, "was the Twain of our politics. Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his contemporary audience or posterity with equal and enduring effectiveness."

The biography of a writer inevitably begins with the biography of a reader. "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing," his half-sister later recalled; "he was active & persistant in learning -- read Everything he Could." Young Abe turned to books to escape what he saw as his illiterate father's dead-end life. By the time he was a young man, a neighbor recalled, his "Conversation very often was about Books -- such as Shakespear & other histories and Tale Books of all Discription in them Day."