“I wrote the life of Lincoln which elected him,” remarked William Dean Howells to Mark Twain in 1876. Howells had just contracted for a campaign biography of Rutherford B. Hayes and was humorously recalling the past to his friend. In 1860 Howells, then a young man of twenty-three, was working as an editorial writer on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus. Except for a book of poems, “The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin” was the first of the one hundred and three books that Howells wrote during the years from 1860 to 1920. Though he attended neither high school nor university, Howells received degrees from six universities, including Oxford, and rejected offers of professorship in literature from Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. The first part is devoted to the biography of Lincoln and some of Mr. Lincoln's speeches. The second part is a biographical sketch of Hannibal Hamlin written by Mr. Hayes.
