Lincoln or Protagoras Philebus and Gorgias

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

Author: Fred Kaplan

For Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered. In Lincoln, acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan explores the life of America's sixteenth president through his use of language as a vehicle both to express complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment. Like the other great canonical writers of American literature — a status he is gradually attaining — Lincoln had a literary career that is inseparable from his life story. An admirer and avid reader of Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Old Testament, Lincoln was the most literary of our presidents. His views on love, liberty, and human nature were shaped by his reading and knowledge of literature.

Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his audience with equal and enduring effectiveness. Kaplan focuses on the elements that shaped Lincoln's mental and imaginative world; how his writings molded his identity, relationships, and career; and how they simultaneously generated both the distinctive political figure he became and the public discourse of the nation. This unique account of Lincoln's life and career highlights the shortcomings of the modern presidency, reminding us, through Lincoln's legacy and appreciation for language, that the careful and honest use of words is a necessity for successful democracy.

Illuminating and engrossing, Lincoln brilliantly chronicles Abraham Lincoln's genius with language.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

The literature about Abraham Lincoln is so vast as to defy comprehension, yet historians and other scholars—not to mention novelists, poets, artists, sculptors, even composers—continue to find new and revealing things to say about this greatest of all Americans. Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is the latest case in point, a book that is certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. To be sure, many others before Kaplan have dealt in various ways with Lincoln's love of literature and writing, but no one has explored the subject so deeply or found so much meaning in it.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Kaplan does a persuasive, highly perceptive job of explicating the influences that various authors had on Lincoln's thinking, as well as the role that writing played in helping the young Illinois politician articulate an identity of his own. In fact, as Mr. Kaplan sees it, language "was the tool by which" Lincoln "explored and defined himself," and as president he would try to find a language to "harness and implement" his political ideas "in a country whose alternative narrative would lead, he believed, to betrayal and disaster."

Publishers Weekly

In this intriguing biography, English professor and literary biographer Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain) analyzes Abraham Lincoln's writings, from the great civic anthems of his presidency to love letters, legal briefs, poems and notebook jottings, and finds a first-rate literary talent-a master storyteller with an earthy wit, sharp logic and an ear for poetic phrasing. From wide reading, Kaplan contends, Lincoln gleaned influences-an Aesopian moralism, a biblical sense of providence, a Byronic melancholy, a Shakespearean understanding of human complexity-that shaped his approach to issues and, through his words, the nation's attitude toward slavery and war. Kaplan sometimes overdoes his critical exegeses of Lincoln's more forgettable efforts ("[Lincoln's] comic depiction of what happens when two people of the same sex are bedded has a heterodox clarity that reveals his familiarity with bodily realities") but many of these readings, like his recasting as free verse a speech on agricultural improvements, are eye-opening. The result is a fresh, revealing study of both Lincoln's language and character. (Nov. 3)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Randall M. Miller - Library Journal

Kaplan (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, English, Queens Coll. & Graduate Ctr., CUNY; Henry James) argues that Lincoln's devotion to the integrity of language gave him a rare credibility as lawyer, legislator, public figure, and President and that Lincoln worked assiduously to master writing as a means of thought as well as expression. To track Lincoln's trajectory as a writer, Kaplan scours what Lincoln read and wrote to discover the roots of his ideas and style variously in scripture, Shakespeare, Byron, other English poets, Burns, historians, satirists, Aesop's fables, American folktales, speeches, etc. Lincoln came to prize clear, common speech as vital to conveying moral vision and democratic principles. His genius for the telling detail and for storytelling itself ensured that his listeners and readers would take hold of his argument. His purpose, says Kaplan, was to persuade rather than to stir emotion. In light of today's political subversion of language, Kaplan's work points the way to our own resetting of the democratic compass thus to direct our path as a free people. For all libraries that serve the public interest.

Kirkus Reviews

How the 16th president used-and transformed-the English language. Famously self-taught, Lincoln's understanding of and familiarity with the language depended to a large degree on his reading, and Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain, 2003, etc.) offers a thorough survey of all the sources that informed the young autodidact. From early influences like the Bible and Dilworth's Speller, to particular favorites like Poe's "The Raven," to the Enlightenment essayists and poets Pope and Milton, to Romantics Burns and Byron and, above all, Shakespeare, Lincoln heard background rhythms he would later masterfully adapt to his own emerging personal voice. Kaplan looks at halting childhood exercises; early political speeches and circulars; love letters and letters to friends; stabs at poetry (overpraised by Kaplan); eulogies for Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay; addresses to Congress; and even a brief to the Supreme Court in Broadwell v. Lewis. The author effectively demonstrates how Lincoln brought elements of his own personality-melancholy and humor, lawyerly precision and clarity, down-to-earth language and intellectual intensity-to prose that came to be defined as quintessentially American. Although the immortal presidential addresses receive scant attention here-perhaps because they've been exhaustively covered in fine books like Harold Holzer's Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (2004) and Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (1992)-by the time Kaplan places Lincoln in the White House, readers require no further guide to Lincoln's methods, nor any further convincing about the man's linguistic brilliance. A highly readable, ofteninsightful analysis of an unequaled prose master for whom writing was "the supreme artifact of human genius."Agent: Georges Borchardt

Table of Contents:

Reading Lincoln's Words 1 Ch. 1 "All the Books He Could Lay His Hands On," 1809-1825 3 Ch. 2 Shakespeare, 1825-1834 30 Ch. 3 Burns, Byron, and Love Letters, 1834-1837 60 Ch. 4 "How Miserably Things Seem to Be Arranged," 1837-1842 99 Ch. 5 "Were I President," 1842-1849 144 Ch. 6 "Honest Seeking," 1849-1854 198 Ch. 7 "The Current of Events," 1855-1861 242 Ch. 8 The Master of Language and the Presidency, 1861-1865 294 Annotated Bibliography 357 Notes 363 Acknowledgments 385 Index 387

Book about: Weight Loss Kit For Dummies or Stretching in the Office

Protagoras, Philebus, and Gorgias

Author: Plato

Is virtue teachable? What should we value as an ideal? Is pleasure or perception the highest good that ought to be the object of our lives? Three of Plato's most important dialogues are brought together in a single volume to address these concerns which continue to occupy serious minds today. In the Protagoras Plato attempts to answer questions about the nature of virtue and whether it is inherent in humans or a subject capable of being taught. In the Philebus he addresses the nature and content of the good and whether wisdom or pleasure is to be preferred. The Gorgias applies what is learned from the previous discussions to address larger issues, such as the proper functioning of society and the state and the individual's appropriate place within them.