The Lincolns Portrait of a Marriage

Although the private lives of political couples have in our era become front-page news, the true story of this extraordinary and tragic first family has never been fully told.The Lincolnseclipses earlier accounts with riveting new information that makes husband and wife, president and first lady, come alive in all their proud accomplishments and earthy humanity. Award-winning biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein gives a fresh close-up view of the couple's life in Springfield, Illinois (of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but six were spent there), and dramatizes with stunning immediacy how the Lincolns' ascent to the White House brought both dazzling power and the slow, secret unraveling of the couple's unique bond. The first full-length portrait of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in more than fifty years,The Lincolnsis written with enormous sweep and striking imagery. Daniel Mark Epstein makes two immortal American figures seem as real and human as the rest of us.

Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as seven volumes of poetry. His verse has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other publications. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Epstein the Rome Prize in 1977 and an Academy Award in 2006. Daniel Mark Epstein lives in Baltimore.

www.danielmarkepstein.com


From the Hardcover edition.