A Self-Made Man

A "fascinating" exploration of Abraham Lincoln's first forty years: his youthful antislavery leanings, difficult search for a wife, and rise to Congress (Booklist, starred review).

From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. A Self-Made Man reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Yet he was a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. His marriage to the upper-class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career.

Based on prodigious research, A Self-Made Man reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. This "compelling first volume of what will no doubt be a landmark biography" (Jon Meacham) traces his life from his birth in 1809 through his education in the political arts, rise to Congress, and fall into the wilderness from which he emerged as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln.

"Engaging and informative . . . thought-provoking." The Christian Science Monitor

"The Lincoln of Blumenthal's pen is . . . a brave progressive facing racist assaults on his religion, ethnicity, and very legitimacy that echo the anti-Obama birther movement . . . . Blumenthal takes the wily pol of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and goes deeper, finding a Vulcan logic and House of Cards ruthlessness." The Washingtonian

"A magnificent look at nineteenth-century American political, economic, and cultural history." The Atlantic

"Splendid . . . no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man . . . without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." Washington Monthly

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