A Friend of Mr. Lincoln - Tapa blanda

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year

"An acute and original portrait of Lincoln ... when our sixteenth president was still a young backwoods lawyer. . . . A rumbling, rambunctious novel, full of its own raw life." --Jerome Charyn, The Washington Post

"Emotionally rich and exquisitely poignant. . . . Harrigan masterfully immerses readers in the story, the era, its sensibilities and its characters." --James Endrst, USA Today

"A novel of real rewards." --Laird Hunt, The New York Times Book Review

"Brings us closer than ever to the human Abraham Lincoln--struggling, reflective, fundamentally noble and so much more appealing than the pasteboard deity of popular myth." --David S. Reynolds, The Wall Street Journal

"Splendid . . . Quickly engages the reader's imagination with its deep perspective, rich historical authenticity and a lively cast of striving, imperfect humans." --Dallas Morning News

"Delightful . . . A fictional friend named Cage Weatherby gives readers an up-close glimpse of the rough-hewed country lawyer ... who longs to achieve something meaningful." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Meticulously researched, gorgeously rendered, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln is a powerful historical novel of friendship, love and ambition." --The Huffington Post

"[An] imaginative--though largely faithful to the historical record--account of the future president's early career." --Chicago Tribune


"Harrigan will fascinate readers with his bits of everyday history." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A fine work that anyone curious about Lincoln's rough and ready days would enjoy reading." --The Houston Chronicle

"Tremendous." --The New York Journal of Books

"An astute look at the public and private sides of the young Abraham Lincoln and the agonizing struggles he endured trying to reconcile the two." --Booklist (starred review)

"In the genre of historical fiction, Stephen Harrigan is the gold standard. . . . No historical novelist working today beats Harrigan at capturing the nuances of a particular zeitgeist . . . and then harnessing his research to a plot of invention so engaging that all a reader can do is keep turning the pages, spellbound." --Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice

"Richly drawn . . . Harrigan shows a young Lincoln in all his moods and temperaments, providing context with vividly detailed historical events." --Library Journal (starred review)

"Harrigan knows his Lincoln and knows how to write. Even when he lets his imagination soar, it is always tethered to the evidence. The result is historical fiction at its very best." --Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Quartet and Founding Brothers

"Superb. . . . Harrigan's standout novel shows the endurance of friendship." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The author of the best-selling The Gates of the Alamo now gives us a galvanizing portrait of Abraham Lincoln during a crucially revealing period of his life, the early Springfield years, when he risked both his sanity and his ethical bearings as he searched for the great destiny he believed to be his.

It is Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s. Abraham Lincoln is a circuit-riding lawyer, a member of the state legislature, a man of almost ungovernable ambition. To his friends he is also a beloved figure, by turns charmingly awkward and mesmerizingly self-possessed—a man of whom they, too, expect big things. Among his friends and political colleagues are Joshua Speed, William Herndon, Stephen Douglas, and many others who have come to the exploding frontier town of Springfield to find their futures.     

It is through another friend, a fictional poet, Cage Weatherby, that we will come to know Lincoln in his twenties and thirties, as a series of formative, surprising incidents unfolds—his service in the Black Hawk War, his participation in a poetry-writing society, a challenge to a duel that begins as a farce but quickly rises to lethal potential . . . Cage both admires and clashes with Lincoln, sometimes questioning his legal ethics and his cautious stance on slavery. But he is by Lincoln’s side as Lincoln slips back and forth between high spirits and soul-hollowing sadness and depression, and as he recovers from a disastrous courtship of one woman to marry the beautiful, capricious, politically savvy Mary Todd. It is Mary who will bring stability to Lincoln’s life, but who will also trigger a conflict that sends the two men on very different paths into the future.

Historically accurate, rich in character, filled with the juice and dreams and raw ambitions of Americans on the make in an early frontier city, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln is a revelatory and moving portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in his young manhood. It is a close-up, involving experience, the sort of vibrant glimpse beneath the veneer of history that only the very best fiction can provide.
From the Hardcover edition.