Although the private lives of political couples have in our
era become front-page news, the true story of this extraordinary
and tragic first family has never been fully told. The
Lincolns eclipses earlier accounts with riveting new
information that makes husband and wife, president and first lady,
come alive in all their proud accomplishments and earthy humanity.
Award-winning biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein gives a fresh
close-up view of the couple’s life in Springfield, Illinois
(of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but six were spent
there), and dramatizes with stunning immediacy how the Lincolns’
ascent to the White House brought both dazzling power and the slow,
secret unraveling of the couple’s unique bond.
The first full-length portrait of the marriage of Abraham and
Mary Todd Lincoln in more than fifty years, The Lincolns is
written with enormous sweep and striking imagery. Daniel Mark
Epstein makes two immortal American figures seem as real and human
as the rest of us.