David Herbert Donald Books

The book explores the diverse roles women have played in the history of rhetoric, from supporting male authority to asserting their autonomy. Through a collection of essays, it analyzes the strategies women have used for self-representation and the emergence of feminist rhetorics that challenge traditional narratives. This examination highlights the evolution of women's voices and their impact on rhetorical practices.

"This fully rounded biography of America's sixteenth President is the product of Donald's half-century of study of Lincoln and his times. In preparing it, Donald has drawn more extensively than any previous writer on Lincoln's personal papers and those of his contemporaries, and he has taken full advantage of the voluminous newly discovered records of Lincoln's legal practice. He presents his findings with the same literary skill and psychological understanding exhibited in his previous biographies, which have received two Pulitzer Prizes ... Much more than a political biography, Donald's Lincoln reveals the development of the future President's character and shows how his private life helped to shape his public career. In Donald's skillful hands, Lincoln emerges as a youthful, vigorous President. One of the youngest men ever to occupy the White House, he was also the husband of an even younger wife and the father of boisterous children. We witness how Lincoln's absorption with politics disrupted his family life, and how his often tumultuous marriage affected his political career. And we see a man renowned for his storytelling and his often sidesplitting humor lapse into the periods of deep melancholy to which he was prone, not only during the dark days of the Civil War but throughout his life ... Donald's strikingly original portrait of Lincoln depicts a man who was basically passive by nature, who confessed that he did not control events but events had controlled him. Yet coupled with that fatalism was an unbounded ambition that drove him to take enormous political risks and enabled him to overcome repeated defeats. Donald shows that Lincoln was a master of ambiguity and expediency--but he also stresses that Lincoln was a great moral leader, inflexibly opposed to slavery and absolutely committed to preserving the Union."--Jacket

The biography offers a comprehensive and updated exploration of Abraham Lincoln and the significant historical period he influenced. Authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald, it delves into Lincoln's life, leadership, and the socio-political landscape of his time, providing fresh insights and perspectives that enrich the understanding of this pivotal figure in American history.

Thomas Wolfe was a writer who famously spewed out words upon the page in endless streams, attempting to achieve The Great American Novel by putting his own life on paper. He wrote four massive novels, combining passages of over-the-top bad writing with some of the most beautiful prose ever committed to paper. His editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell became almost as famous as Wolfe for their Herculean efforts in getting his titanic manuscripts into publishable form. Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), and his two posthumously published works, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) are classics of American literature, though today entirely unfashionable. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for this appreciative biography of the genius of purple prose.