Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years One Volume Edition

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years One Volume Edition by Carl Sandburg Hardcover Cloth 762 pages. Condition Very Good Dust Jacket Good. Stated First edition 1954. Handsome red boards and gold embossing shows off this Clean, tight, square copy with no marks, highlights or bookplates. Red Topstain. Book Well kept and carefully stored in unread condition. Slight shelf wear. An unclipped dust jacket with heavy shelf wear - tears, stains, and wrinkles. Not an ex-library, book club or remainder copy.

Out of his monumental six-volume work on Lincoln and his times, Carl Sandburg has written this definitive one-volume biography. The first part, "The Prairie Years," recounts Lincoln's youth and early career before he attained the presidency.

The story, of course, starts with his family settling in Kentucky, where Lincoln was born in 1809. Later, he moved with his family to Illinois. Lincoln began in New Salem and later moved to Springfield. Sandburg's depiction of his development, to becoming a practiced attorney, his political ambitions, his brief time in the militia, lays out the standard treatment of Lincoln, written extraordinarily well.

Many anecdotes dot the volume. We see his doomed relationship with Ann Rutledge and his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. The discussion of his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in the Senate Campaign that brought him national visibility (and rendered him viable as a potential presidential candidate) is well told. Then, the work goes on to explore his place in the Civil War.

The volume speaks poignantly of the family tragedy that he experienced (the death of a child is always difficult), the strained relationship with his wife, the challenges of orchestrating the Union's war effort. Carl August Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat".