David Herbert Donald Profile

When he left his home town of Goodman, Mississippi, David Herbert Donald had little idea that he would become a professor at his country's greatest universities, but at the University of Illinois he fell under the influence of the leading authority on President Abraham Lincoln, and was soon assisting him in researching a biography of the 16th president.

In time, David Herbert Donald would become a great historian himself, a professor at Columbia, Princeton and Harvard. He would train a generation of historians and win two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner and the Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe.

In the 1990s, Professor Donald published his crowning accomplishment, Lincoln, an acclaimed biography of the president who saved the Union. In Donald's gripping, novelistic account, Lincoln emerges from the mists of legend, as a living, breathing human being -- complex, subtle, and burning with ambition. The Lincoln revealed in Donald's pages is a far more human but no less admirable figure than readers had met before. It was David Herbert Donald's great achievement to bring Abraham Lincoln to life for a new generation, and for all time.