Richard Wightman Fox

Even two hundred years after Abraham Lincoln's death, we, like Walt Whitman, "love the President personally." In a stunning feat of scholarship, insight, and engaging prose, Lincoln's Body explores how a president ungainly in body and downright "ugly" of aspect came to mean so much to us. The very roughness of Lincoln's appearance made him seem all the more common, one of us-as did his sense of humor about his own awkward physical nature. Nineteenth-century...