Lincoln is the
centerpiece of Gore Vidal's series of American history novels. It takes
place during only four years of Abraham Lincoln's life, the four
turbulent years when as president he waged the Civil War to keep the
union together.
Instead of conjecturing about Lincoln's every thought, Vidal employs
the shifting points of view of Lincoln's supporters, rivals, and
enemies, including his young personal secretary,
John Hay; the mentally ill Mary Todd Lincoln; cabinet members
William Seward and Salmon P. Chase; and a drugstore clerk who
eventually helps John Wilkes Booth carry out his assassination plot.
In portraying perhaps our greatest president, Vidal balances the public
figure with the private man who copes with his wife's capricious
behavior and the death of their son Willie. Lincoln agonizes over the
hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives being lost, but he is also a
crafty politician, willing to suspend habeas corpus
to serve his purposes. His cause is preserving the union, not
abolition, and he frees the
slaves only when that's expedient. The complexity of the character
Vidal depicts makes Lincoln intensely human and sympathetic, and by the
time the doomed Lincoln enters the Ford Theater at the end of the
nearly 700-page book, readers may well be shedding tears.
Lincoln has
been subject to the same question as all historical fiction: How is the
reader to know what's fact and what's invented? In an afterward, Vidal
tells us what characters are fictional and where he tinkered with
historical fact. Lincoln, which was reviewed for Vidal by Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald, is generally praised for staying close to the line of authenticity.
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