Reading with Lincoln

By Robert Bray

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

Robert Bray's 2010 study examines the books Abraham Lincoln read and their influence on his thinking and prose. Largely self-educated, Lincoln absorbed the Bible, Shakespeare, Aesop and the poetry of Robert Burns and Lord Byron, along with the skeptical works of Thomas Paine, Volney and Voltaire. Bray works through the evidence for each book Lincoln is known or said to have read, separating documented reading from legend and showing its traces in his speeches and writing.

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