Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America - Hardcover

Wills, Garry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0783888570 ISBN 13: 9780783888576

Publisher: G K Hall & Co, 2000

Synopsis

Describes how, in the space of 272 words, the President brought to bear the rhetoric of the Greek Revival, the categories of trancendentalism, and the imagery of the Rural Cemetary Movement.

About this title

Review

A former professor of Greek at Yale University, Wills painstakingly deconstructs Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and discovers heavy influence from the early Greeks (Pericles) and the 19th century Transcendentalists (Edward Everett). The author also probes Lincoln's decision to rely more on the Declaration of Independence than the U.S. Constitution, a decision Wills says represented a "revolution in thought." He speaks effusively of the 272-word address: "All modern political prose descends from [it]. The Address does what all great art accomplishes. [I]t tease[s] us out of thought." Wills' book won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

About the Author

Garry Wills, former Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University, is the author of Inventing America and Explaining America, as well as Reagan's America, Under God, Nixon Agonistes, The Kennedy Imprisonment, and other books. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Edition details

• Publisher: G K Hall & Co
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0783888570
• ISBN 13: 9780783888576
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 428