Abe and his mighty pen

Kaplan does a good job of tracing the young man's reading habits, identifying favorite books and noting their influence on the mature politician. Lincoln began with the Bible and John Bunyan's religious allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress." Despite the Christian background, though, he was hardly devout: He learned from Christian classics a prose style that swells into poetry, but, as Kaplan explains, "any faith he had had in the literal truth of biblical claims slipped away." He was never a churchgoer and, though he knew the persuasive power of a citation from Scripture, he didn't take theology seriously.

He cared much more about history. He read early classics on American political figures, such as Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography" and Mason Weems' "Life of Washington." British philosophers and historians like Hugh Blair, David Hume and Edward Gibbon were favorites, as were Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. These were standard authors in 19th century America, but Lincoln's reading was unconventional in some respects. He had little interest in fiction, especially in the novel. He knew works by Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (on meeting Stowe he is supposed to have said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war"), but these were exceptions rather than the rule.

Poetry, on the other hand, was a lifelong passion. He adored the moody atmosphere of Thomas Gray, the satiric bite of Alexander Pope, the earthy and folksy language of Robert Burns, the lyric beauty of Lord Byron. He also had favorites among more recent American poets: A friend reported that, as a young lawyer, he "carried Poe around" as he traveled, "read and loved the Raven -- repeated it over & over."

One writer, though, dominated Lincoln's mind: Shakespeare, whose works he read until he learned many passages by heart. Kaplan chronicles Shakespearean echoes in many of his writings, referring to political speeches like his famous second inaugural address ("With malice toward none, with charity for all") as "Shakespearean soliloquies of a sort." More important, Lincoln used the plays to make sense of the world. He thought about the U.S. Civil War with the aid of Shakespeare's "Henry VI" plays, viewed racial difference through the lens of "Othello" and human nature itself through "Hamlet."