Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin

"I wrote the life of Lincoln which elected him," remarked William Dean Howells to Mark Twain in 1876. Howells had just contracted for a campaign biography of Rutherford B. Hayes and was humorously recalling the past to his friend. In 1860 Howells, then a young man of twenty-three, was working as an editorial writer on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus. Except for a book of poems, "The Lives and S...