Covering more than 100 pages, Sandburg’s description of Lincoln’s last moments provides a fascinating and engrossing conclusion to the series. In addition, this series provides the most thorough and dramatic account of Lincoln’s assassination that I’ve yet read. The congressional plot against Secretary of State Seward is particularly interesting and the chapter describing Robert E. I’ve also never witnessed a more complete description of the drudgery of Lincoln’s day-to-day life as President (with innumerable requests for patronage, pardons or other favors). For example, the reader is introduced more thoroughly to the Confederate Cabinet and its provocative personalities than anywhere else I’ve ventured. On the other hand, with such breadth and depth Sandburg is able to provide insight into topics rarely found in other Lincoln biographies. Matters which might be dispatched with a paragraph, or perhaps a page, are routinely covered in ten or twenty pages. On more than one occasion I lost track of which part of Lincoln’s life was being discussed since the text wandered so deeply into one topic or another that previously familiar terrain became unrecognizable. A casual reader will often get lost in unimportant details and miss the forest for the trees. Unfortunately, while most of the big picture moments will strike the reader as familiar, much of the surrounding detail will not. As a result, “The War Years” is heavy on details – both important and trivial – and requires an immense investment of time. But unlike Sandburg’s coverage of Lincoln’s first fifty-two years in “The Prairie Years” which consumed more than nine-hundred pages, this series covers just four years of Lincoln’s life in nearly three times more pages. Periodic interruptions in the flow allow the author to explore cultural or political topics which could probably be placed nearly anywhere in the series. Like its predecessor volumes, “The War Years” is mostly – but not strictly – chronological. Instead, this series is heavy and more dense and only sparingly reveals its author’s normal passion for verse and dexterity. Unlike Sandburg’s “The Prairie Years” which covered Lincoln’s childhood and early career as a lawyer and politician, “The War Years” does not have the sprightly, effervescent feel of a biography written by a poet. Like Lincoln, Sandburg was a son of the Illinois prairie and as a consequence he harbored a lifelong interest in the sixteenth president. “The War Years” was a monumental effort which earned Sandburg, already a well-known American poet and an increasingly well-regarded biographer, the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in history. Written by Carl Sandburg and published in 1939, it was published about a dozen years after Sandburg’s two-volume “ Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years” covering the first five decades of Lincoln’s life. “ Abraham Lincoln: The War Years” is a four-volume, 2,400 page biography focused on Lincoln’s presidency and death.
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