Excerpt from Meet Mr. Lincoln: The Extraordinary Document That Relives the Immortal President's Years of Crisis, in Words and Pictures Meet mr. Lincoln was conceived as a dramatic essay about a man whose simplicity of being was the spirit of his greatness. In our time, it is a greatness that travels the world, a spirit that lives in distant places. Yet, in America, something has happened to the Lincoln legend, something has passed away. A kind of pleasant myth has sapped the strength of an exciting reality. Perhaps it is because we in America, in childlike innocence, have too eagerly accepted Lincoln in godlike terms, or perhaps it is because, in adult pride, we have ignored the person in order to create a proud image on a towering pedestal obscured in wispy clouds of blind allegiance. Whatever - the beauty of Lincoln has too often been colored by the cloak of complexity. To be sure, Lincoln was a man of wondrous depth, of warm love and craggy manner, of slow, brilliant reasoning and quick, hand-hewn philosophy, of softness and hardness, and in appearance a paradox, a beautiful ugliness that was poetry in expression. He was a man loved and hated for the same thing at the same time. He was all the things that men are, and if there is any mystery about the man Lincoln, it is because he was infinitely human. That was his greatness and his genius, created from a thousand complexities, but molded into a oneness of purpose. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.