Murder & Memory
William Dean Howells. Excerpt from the The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin (1860), Belmont, Massachusetts, 1880. Manuscript. |
William Dean Howells (1837-1920), journalist, novelist, poet, and biographer, penned a campaign biography of Lincoln entitled The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin (Columbus, Ohio, 1860). In 1880, Howells sent this excerpt from his biography to Lincoln collector Osborn H. Oldroyd for the latter’s 1883 monumental work, The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles, comprised of tributes to Lincoln by eminent American and European writers and statesmen. Howell writes, on custom paper supplied by Oldroyd, that “No admirer, who speaks in his praise, must pause to conceal a stain upon his good name. No true man falters in his affection at the remembrance of any mean action or littleness in the life of Lincoln. The purity of his reputation, the greatness and dignity of his ambition, ennobles every incident of his career, and give significance to all events of his past.” b *2007M-56 Purchased in 2007 on the Bayard Livingston & Kate Gray Kilgour Fund |
