Now in paperback, this award-winning biography has been hailed as the definitive portrait of Lincoln.

This book supplants Carl Sandburg and supersedes all other biographies. Future Lincoln books cannot be written without it, and from no other book can a general reader learn so much about Abraham Lincoln. It is the essential title for the bicentennial. -- James L. Swanson Publishers Weekly 2008 A complete view of Lincoln's life... thorough. -- Diane Cole U.S. News & World Report 2008 A monumental boxed effort that weighs in at 10 pounds... The result is a picture of Lincoln from all sides, in a style that is relentless but not daunting. Bloomberg News 2008 A magisterial enterprise. -- William Safire New York Times 2009 If you aspire to Ultimate Lincoln Knowledge this is a must-read. Chicago Tribune 2009 These monumental volumes deserve a wide readership. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 2009 Burlingame is a towering figure in Lincoln scholarship, and students of the 16th president have been waiting for this book for years. For all his learning-Burlingame may know more about Lincoln and his era than anyone in the world-his take on his subject is fresh, and he doesn't gloss over Lincoln's less appealing attributes. Abraham Lincoln comes as close to being the definitive biography as anything the world has seen in decades. Time.com An exhaustive and stylishly written biography. -- Greg Rienzi Gazette 2009 A stunning feat of research. -- Michael F. Bishop Publishers Weekly 2009 The two-volume set is being heralded as the ultimate new biography of Lincoln, an essential work to be used by all future biographers of the 16th president. -- Anne Byle Grand Rapids Press 2009 The granddaddy of all the recent books on Lincoln is Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life... monumental in size, depth and scholarship, this is the new standard biography of our time and surpasses all other life portraits of our 16th president, and is the most important book of the bicentennial. -- James L. Swanson Washington Times 2009 No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame. -- Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Monthly 2009 The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth has generated a plethora of Lincoln-related items, but none impresses more than this two-volume biography... Essential. Choice 2009 The author knows more about Lincoln than any other living person. -- James McPherson New York Review of Books 2009 Most thorough account of the development of Lincoln as a man and politician against the backdrop of America's struggle to mature as an idea and a nation... Not a Lincoln for our times, but the Lincoln of his times, and future biographers would do well to take note(s). Books and Culture: A Christian Review 2009 This magisterial work tells a rich, thoroughly documented, birth-to-death story of America's greatest president. Its bulk is formidable, but it holds countless rewards for undaunted readers. -- Jane Henderson St. Louis Post-Dispatch 2009 Burlingame very likely knows more about Lincoln than anyone who's ever lived, including Mary Todd, and his biography, 20 years in the writing, has a revelation on every page, dug out during the biographer's tireless research into musty libraries and forgotten attics that no one has ever thought to look in before. If there is anything knowable that you want to know about Lincoln, this is the place to find it. -- Andrew Ferguson American Spectator 2010

Michael Burlingame is Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author or editor of several books about Lincoln, including Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, published by Johns Hopkins, and The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln.