Abe and his mighty pen

These were the figures who shaped Lincoln's literary consciousness and helped to transform the reader into a writer. Not all his literary efforts were successful. Around age 15, he wrote these less-than-stirring verses: "Abraham Lincoln is my name / And with my pen I wrote the same / I wrote it in both haste and speed / and left it here for fools to read." Kaplan points out the "adolescent cuteness" of this and other early works. But when his style matured, he had no rivals among politicians and few in the wider world. Whether it was telling bawdy stories to intimates, drafting legislation or writing speeches to inspire a worried nation, Lincoln used language to maximum effect.

Kaplan is a biographer on a mission, and he doesn't try to tell the whole story of Lincoln's life and times. There's little original research in the book, no surprising facts discovered in long-forgotten archives. Every source is easily available and has been discussed by other biographers. This book focuses, instead, as the subtitle promises, on "the Biography of a Writer," and things that don't fit easily under this heading are either touched on briefly or skipped altogether. There are good reasons for this, not least that it keeps the book to a manageable length.

Still, it feels odd that Lincoln's entire presidency and the U.S. Civil War should occupy just 30 pages in a biography, and his assassination is mentioned only in the book's final sentence.

But the portrait of a "personality and a career forged in the crucible of language" is powerful and convincing. Kaplan's page-one summary captures the spirit of the book as a whole: "For Lincoln, words mattered immensely. His increasing skill in their use during his lifetime, and his high valuation of their power, mark him as the one president who was both a national leader and a genius with language at a time when its power and integrity mattered more than it does today."