Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 - Biography & Autobiography - 350 pages
A thoughtful, nuanced portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Recipient of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award and a forWard Award from the National Mental Health Association

Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded the sixteenth president's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the president's character and his leadership.

Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health from the time he was a young man. Shenk draws from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of his unhappiness. In the process, he discovers that the President's coping strategies -- among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection -- ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil.

"A shapely and insightful exegesis of the Civil War president's inner life...Beautiful."--Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author of The Noonday Demon
 

Contents

Introduction
1
PART ONE
9
The Community Said He Was Crazy
11
A Fearful Gift
26
I Am Now the Most Miserable Man Living
43
PART TWO
67
A SelfMade Man
69
A Misfortune Not a Fault
81
Its Precise Shape and Color
126
The Fiery Trial Through Which We Pass
159
Comes Wisdom to Us
191
Epilogue
211
What Everybody Knows
221
Notes
244
Bibliography
300
Acknowledgments
323

The Reign of Reason
97
The Vents of My Moods and Gloom
112
PART THREE
125

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About the author (2005)

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and independent scholar whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and in the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, New Republic, the Economist, U.S. News and World Report, and other publications. His book, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, has won awards from the Abraham Lincoln Institute, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Mental Health Association.

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