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In: The Lincoln Herald, Vol. 110, No. 4, Winter 2008. Published by Lincoln Memorial University Press and Abraham Lincoln Library.


Abraham Lincoln began to appear as a character in American fiction shortly after the Civil War, but the Lincoln novel matured during the second half of the twentieth century. Earlier treatments of Lincoln in American fictional works, such as Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1867), Edward Eggleston’s The Graysons (1888), and Honore Morrow’s The Last Full Measure (1930) tended to portray Lincoln as a saintly and sentimentalized figure, a heroic individual without flaws or personal demons. By 1950, however, Lincoln scholars had already begun to show the man’s warts, and novelists would follow suit.