'The Lincoln Anthology' edited by Harold Holzer, 'The Best American History Essays on Lincoln' edited by Sean Wilentz, Ronald C. White's biography 'A. Lincoln' and others

The Lincoln Anthology

Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now

Harold Holzer

Library of America: 800 pp., $40

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The Best American History Essays on Lincoln

Edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians

Palgrave Macmillan: 252 pp., $16.95 paper

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A. Lincoln

A Biography

Ronald C. White Jr.

Random House: 798 pp., $35

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Giants

The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

John Stauffer

Twelve: 448 pp., $30

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Abraham Lincoln

James M. McPherson

Oxford University Press: 80 pp., $12.95

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Looking Ffor Lincoln

The Making of an American Icon

Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt , Jr.

Alfred A. Knopf: 512 pp., $50

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It was Tuesday, May 30, 1922, the day of the dedication of the solemn and splendid memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, and the ceremony on the Mall featured speeches by President Warren Harding and Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

The most interesting observations about the 16th president, however, were not spoken amid the pomp but in the pages of the Crisis, the journal of the NAACP founded by W.E.B. DuBois. "Abraham Lincoln was a Southern poor white . . . poorly educated and unusually ugly, awkward, ill-dressed. . . . He was big enough to be inconsistent -- cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man -- a big, inconsistent, brave man."

DuBois' observations were brief yet controversial (one reader called them "unkind and uncalled for"), and he defended them in the next edition of the magazine. "We love to think of the Great as flawless," DuBois wrote. "We yearn in our imperfection toward perfection -- sinful, we envisage Righteousness." Such idolatry, however, serves little purpose: If we require the perfect and the righteous to lead us to higher ground, then we are not likely to get there, for there is not exactly a burgeoning oversupply of perfect and righteous leaders.

The conflict between the adulatory impulses of hero-worshipers and the cooler calculations of the historically minded is perennial. But the tension is especially interesting in Lincoln's case since he is perhaps the most universally admired and revered member of the American pantheon.