The Portable Abraham Lincoln (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Lincoln, Abraham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143105647 ISBN 13: 9780143105640

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

Celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with this new edition of his greatest speeches and writings

Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that has all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. Lincoln's writings are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. The Portable Abraham Lincoln contains the great public speeches - the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address - along with less familiar letters and memoranda that chart Lincoln's political career, his evolving stand against slavery, and his day-to-day conduct of the Civil War. This edition includes a revised introduction, updated notes on the text, a chronology of Lincoln's life, and four new selections of his writing.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

About the Author

Abraham Lincoln

Andrew Delbanco was born in 1952. Educated at Harvard, he has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. He writes frequently on American culture for many national journals and papers, and  has co-directed a number of seminars for high school and college teachers at the National Endowment for the Humanities Center and under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among his previous works are The Death of Satan, Required Reading, A New England Anthology, and The Puritan Ordeal, which received the 1990 Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia University, where he is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities. Mr. Delbanco lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

From Library Journal

This abbreviated edition of Lincoln speeches, letters, and notes brings the man ready to hand. Drawn from the fuller Library of America collection (1989), this collection shows Lincoln at work in law, politics, and war. All the great Lincoln works are here, with the added bonus of several personal memos that show Lincoln's humor. Reviled in life but revered in death, Lincoln has become the singlemost important American public writer: his words recalling those "mystic chords of memory" that bind Americans to the Declaration of Independence as the seedbed for all definitions of freedom ring true today in a post-Cold War World. Larger libraries will prefer the fuller Lincoln editions for their shelves, and general readers will find much the same fare in the recent collection, Lincoln on Democracy ( LJ 10/15/91), compiled by Mario Cuomo, but Delbanco's intelligent selection will also help us "get right with Lincoln" and appreciate how the prairie lawyer became the poet of American democracy.
- Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0143105647
• ISBN 13: 9780143105640
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Delbanco Andrew