Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & The War Years

I believe Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War years, emphasizes the social nature of print. Throughout the book, he uses manuscripts of Lincoln's own personal writings (letters, speeches, professional documents, diary entries, etc.) to paint a very specific portrait of Lincoln's persona. "Every biographer," he says, "is under compulsion to omit all or parts of Lincoln letters and speeches that he would like to include; this in part explains why any Lincoln biography is different from any or all other... Supposing all could be told, it would take a far longer time to tell than it was taken to enact in life."

In the preface to the single volume edition written in May of 1954, Carl Sandburg discusses the evolution of his work since it was first published in the early 1920's. Initially a six-volume edition, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years was Sandburg's attempt "to make a certain portrait of Abraham Lincoln... as the country lawyer and prairie politician." After it's publication, he had become so enamored with Lincoln that he went on to write a four-volume book called The War Years. Twenty-eight years after his initial publication, Sandburg condensed them all into a single volume. Despite having what must have seemed like an endless amount of text to work with when attempting to condense the material, he acknowledges that he also "made use of such new materials and researches as throw added light on the life and personality of Lincoln." This highlights the fluid nature of how texts are created, specifically when they are based on a variety of manuscripts that weren't intended to be released to the public. Sandburg's book highlights how his recreation of a man's identity was based on a biased selection of texts that operates not under a regulated, authoritative system, but on the social distribution of ideas and documents that change over time.