The Lives of Lincoln is a collective biography of our greatest President by writers from his own time. The defining events of Lincoln's life and career, along with fascinating descriptions of his personality and behavior, are presented chronologically in forty-five selections, each by a different author. Their accounts illuminate both the public and private man. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Henry, James Russell Lowell, Elizabeth Keckley, Nicolay & Hay, William Seward, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ida Tarbell, Walt Whitman, and (through a brief autobiographical sketch) Lincoln himself.