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A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War
Liveright
February 2014
On Sale: January 26, 2014
Featuring: Abraham Lincoln
482 pages
ISBN: 0871404273
EAN: 9780871404275
Kindle: B00DX5X80S
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic
I Am Abraham promises to be the masterwork of
Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career. Since
publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has
established himself as one of the most inventive and
prolific literary chroniclers of the American landscape.
Here in I Am Abraham, Charyn returns with an
unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War.
Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham
effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in
the process creating an achingly human portrait of our
sixteenth President. Tracing the historic arc of
Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young
lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable
marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to
war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination,
I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln
saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as
Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's
dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost
treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional
extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on,
speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic
whores. We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who
flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard
shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as
well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken,
hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for
their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black
recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but
who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the
center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad
in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the
darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war. Using
biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century
humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn
concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief,
whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and
sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating
psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by
melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human
worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant,
three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely
seen in historical fiction.
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