Overview
Brash and skeptical when she first came to the Unites States in the 1950s, Jan Morris cast a decidedly dubious eye on the sainly image of Abraham Lincoln and the log-cabin-to-the-White-House legend that surrounded him. In innumerable visits over the last fifty years, she has tried to make up her own mind about the sixteenth president, and after nearly half a century she has crystallized her conclusions in this unique portrait—part historical fact, part travelogue, part reconstruction, part personal specualtion—her first book on American since the accliamed Manhattan '45.
Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the finest writers on history and travel in this century, Morris is part of the long tradition of foreigner observers who are able to illuminate America for Americans. In Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest, she looks at Lincoln with her singular perspective, and the result is a historical journey free of sentiment and nostalgia.
Morris has not only traveled wherever Lincoln traveled, from his alleged log cabin birthplace to the box in Ford's Theater where he was assassinated, but she has willed herself into his time and, with wit and sagacity, she brings us as close as she can to the presence of the man. She conjures him in both his personal and public capacities—politician and father, commander-in-chief in a time of national calamity, orator, and husband.
We sit in the chair of an Illinois judge as Lincoln the lawyer argues a case. We hear from across the road in Springfield of Lincoln's household squablles with his wife. We take tea with President Lincoln at the White House. We imagine his responses to the seductive comforts of a slave plantation, and wonder what would have happened had he come face-to-face with his celebrated opponent in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee. Morris excavates myths about Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks; his love affair with Ann Rutledge; his marriage to the unstable Mary Todd; and his often frustrated relationships with his Union generals.
With her iconoclasm and humor and marvelous sense of place, Morris seamlessly blends travel narrative, history and biography with transatlantic insights into the origins of the American Empire to reveal the real Lincoln—maverick, artist, oddball, natural aristocrat.
About the Author:
Jan Morris has written more than thirty books on the British Empire, Europe, Venice, Oxford, Sydney, Hong Kong, Manhattan, and Wales, as well as six volumes of collected essays and two autobiographical works. Her novel, Last Letters from Hav, was a finalist for the Booker Prize in London. She is an honorary D.Litt. of the Universities of Wales and Glamorgan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She lives in Wales.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The Lincoln revealed by British writer Morris is a far cry from the Honest Abe of popular myth: she finds an "unpleasant side" to the president's nature, an "element of the mountebank" that "led him into spite or mayhem." But what else, Morris seems to ask, should we expect from someone who was "surely only another party politician anyway"? Morris confesses that ever since the 1950s, when she (then a he, named James Morris) first set foot in the U.S., she has been skeptical of the American veneration of Lincoln. In this indulgent excursion, she combines considerable (but idiosyncratic) historical homework and some extensive travel around the U.S. with a lot of imaginative license to paint a thoroughly subjective picture of Lincoln. Morris, the author of a variety of historically oriented travel books (Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, etc.), does make some larger points, calling Lincoln "the originator of American hubris." She also gleefully reports on Lincoln's well-known ambivalence toward slavery as though she, for the first time, is revealing that Lincoln was not the unconflicted emancipator portrayed in grade-school history books. And it's not just Lincoln who irritates her. She is affronted as well by the Lincoln lookalikes she finds in museums and gift shops. (But then most Americans she meets in her travels seem to be stupid, not to mention obese.) More than anything, Morris is surprised and dismayed at Lincoln's folksiness, not recognizing that this is one of the qualities most prized in American presidents, from Jackson to Truman. In this book, it's not only Lincoln that Morris fails to understand; it's an entire culture. Agent, Julian Bach. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.School Library Journal
YA-When Morris first visited the United States in the 1950s, she felt that Abraham Lincoln's image was much like the grape jelly served in diners and coffee shops. It was "synthetic, oversweet, slobbery of texture, artificially colored and unavoidable." She wondered, however, if her assessment then had been correct, and decided to "follow his life and career wherever it took him." The author does follow Lincoln from his roots in England and Wales, through Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and on to Washington. She emphasizes that he was not just "everybody grown taller" or an idealized Huck Finn. To get in touch with Lincoln and return him to human status, rather than an icon, she even imagines him in various settings. She conjures up General Lee waiting for Lincoln's arrival, "the Marble Model" meeting Abe, who "stumped in, as if he needed oiling." After examining his upbringing, his family life, and his role as commander in chief, Morris finds much to admire in Lincoln. She carefully recounts his foibles, making him a most human president, who achieved "full sincerity-in his brief moments of creative inspiration." A warm, readable, well-rounded picture of this extremely complex man.-Jane S. Drabkin, Potomac Community Library, Woodbridge, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.David Walton
Morris's efficient skepticism cuts through the ridiculous and sentimental, and Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest is a marvelously compressed and persuasive portrayal of this most iconic of American presidents.—The New York Times Book Review
James M. McPherson
Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest is a witty, urbane, imaginative, sometimes cynical but at other times admiring narrative of Lincoln's life and its meaning.—Times Literary Supplement