None

"Michael Burlingame is one of the foremost authorities on Abraham Lincoln in the world; as James McPherson wrote in The New York Review of Books, "The author knows more about Lincoln than any other living person." The author or editor of over a dozen volumes about Lincoln, he is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. This book represents an abridgement of his magisterial 2-volume Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, which was first published in 2008 as a hardcover set and in 2013 as separate paperbacks and ebooks. In these pages, Burlingame treats Lincoln's childhood and early development, frontier experiences as a farm boy (with an abusive father) in the rugged Indiana and Illinois country of the early nineteenth century, romantic attachments and losses; his acquired love of learning, legal training, courtroom career; his political ambition, term as congressman in the late 1840s, subsequent defeat and serious bouts of depression in the 1850s. Burlingame depicts, without rose-colored glasses, the Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln marriage. He recovers, in fresh detail, Lincoln's early race baiting and traces the mounting moral criticism of slavery that revived a political career and won this Springfield lawyer the presidency, with a Republican plurality, in 1860. This abridgement delivers Burlingame's signature insight into Lincoln as young man, father, and politician"--