Daniel Mark Epstein. (2007). Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. Random House Publishing Group.

Daniel Mark Epstein. 2007. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. Random House Publishing Group.

Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

Daniel Mark Epstein. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

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Lincoln and Whitman

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1. • value: Biography
2. • value: Historical
3. • value: lincoln
4. • value: non fiction
5. • value: Whitman
6. • value: culture
7. • value: BIOS
8. • value: society
9. • value: Social Studies
10. • value: memories
11. • value: Civil War
12. • value: Social History
13. • value: Walt Whitman
14. • value: true story
15. • value: Inspirational
16. • value: inspiration
17. • value: biographies
18. • value: Abraham Lincoln
19. • value: History
20. • value: cultural history
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24. • value: Biographical
25. • value: motivational books
26. • value: nonfiction books
27. • value: history books
28. • value: History book
29. • value: books about history
30. • value: biography autobiography
31. • value: historical non fiction
32. • value: books about history for adults
33. • value: historical non fiction books
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Epstein, Daniel Mark
   • bioText: Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of 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 national publications. Epstein lives in Baltimore.
   • name: Daniel Mark Epstein

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Random House

publishDate

2007-12-18T00:00:00-05:00

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title

Lincoln and Whitman

fullDescription

It was more than coincidence—indeed, it was all but fate—that the lives and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman should converge during the terrible years of the Civil War. Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this radiant book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the president and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of dramatic, atmospheric scenes. Whitman, though initially skeptical of the Illinois Republican, became enthralled when Lincoln stopped in New York on the way to his first inauguration. During the war years, after Whitman moved to Washington to minister to wounded soldiers, the poet’s devotion to the president developed into a passion bordering on obsession. “Lincoln is particularly my man, and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man.”
As Epstein shows, the influence and reverence flowed both ways. Lincoln had been deeply immersed in Whitman’s verse when he wrote his incendiary “House Divided” speech, and Whitman remained an influence during the darkest years of the war. But their mutual impact went beyond the intellectual. Epstein brings to life the many friends and contacts his heroes shared—Lincoln’s debonair private secretary John Hay, the fiery abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the mysterious and possibly dangerous Polish Count Gurowski—as he unfolds the story of their legendary encounters in New York City and especially Washington during the war years.
Blending history, biography, and a deeply informed appreciation of Whitman’s verse and Lincoln’s rhetoric, Epstein has written a masterful and original portrait of two great men and the era they shaped through the vision they held in common.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Baltimore Sun
   • content: "RIVETING...the book places its two subjects in uniquely sharp perspective. A compelling portrait of Lincoln and Whitman as contemporaries, as visionaries, and as Americans."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Savannah Morning News
   • content: "A pleasure to read. It's...easy to be charmed by Epstein's style."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Newsday
   • content: "VIVID...Lincoln and Whitman is nothing if not balanced. Epstein deftly traces the links between Whitman's poems and Lincoln's speeches...echoes that reverberate."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Sun
   • content: "There have not been many poet-biographers in this country...Epstein is part of [a] select company. Mr. Epstein's new book shows that poetry is at the heart of what made both Lincoln, and the country great."
5. • premium: False
   • source: David S. Reynolds, author of the prize-winning Walt Whitman's America
   • content: "Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America's greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he recreates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kenneth Silverman, Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and author of Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse
   • content: "Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double-narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Eric Foner, The Washington Post
   • content: "A revealing character study."
8. • premium: False
   • source: KENNETH SILVERMAN, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Life and Times of Cotton Mather and Edgar A. Poe: Mournful Never-ending Remembrance
   • content: "Epstein memorably evokes the look and feel of Washington during the Civil War, the eerily adjacent lives there of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and the frantic events that issued in the murder of our greatest president and the writing of our greatest poem, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.' Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror."
9. • premium: False
   • source: HAROLD HOLZER, author of The Lincoln Image and co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
   • content: "Perhaps only a writer who has produced both biography and poetry could have crafted such an illuminating, elegant book. The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime. Both Lincoln and Whitman--together with the long-vanished culture in which they lived--come vividly, sometimes startlingly, alive in Daniel Mark Epstein's luminous prose."
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 22, 2003
      Poet and biographer Epstein (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,
      about Edna St. Vincent Millay) covers the same ground canvassed most recently, and more ably, by Roy Morris Jr. in his much-praised The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War
      . Where Epstein falters is in his basic paradigm: a narrative that insists on interleaving the "parallel"—but never intersecting—lives of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. The two never met. They shared no common ground in politics—Whitman, a copperhead Democrat, a bigot and no abolitionist, thought the Northern cause in the Civil War absurd. That Lincoln read and was impressed by Leaves of Grass
      is questioned by most scholars, yet Epstein takes it on face value. Later, moved by the tragic drama of the president's murder, Whitman wrote two elegiac poems ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Captain, My Captain"). His subsequent "Specimen Days and Collect" included diary memoranda referring to glimpses of Lincoln around Washington, and in old age the impoverished Whitman sometimes raised money for himself by giving talks containing his reminiscences of Lincoln and wartime Washington. But the "parallels" between these two very different lives don't hold together the thread of Epstein's narrative. As well, readers well versed in the story of Whitman and his milieu during the early 1860s will be annoyed by several small errors. (Example: The New York poet and farmer Myron Benton was not a friend of Whitman's, though he was a fan of the poet's and had a mutual friend in John Burroughs.)

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shortDescription

It was more than coincidence—indeed, it was all but fate—that the lives and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman should converge during the terrible years of the Civil War. Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this radiant book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the president and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of...

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Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington

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2. • code: BIO011000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State
3. • code: HIS036050
   • description: History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)