Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 - 350 pages
Drawing on seven years of his own research and the work of other esteemed Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenth president harnessed his depression to fuel his astonishing success.
Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation's worst crisis in the "coping strategies" he had developed over a lifetime of persevering through depressive episodes and personal tragedies.
With empathy and authority gained from his own experience with depression, Shenk crafts a nuanced, revelatory account of Lincoln and his legacy. Based on careful, intrepid research, Lincoln's Melancholy unveils a wholly new perspective on how our greatest president brought America through its greatest turmoil.
Shenk relates Lincoln's symptoms, including mood swings and at least two major breakdowns, and offers compelling evidence of the evolution of his disease, from "major depression" in his twenties and thirties to "chronic depression" later on. Shenk reveals the treatments Lincoln endured and his efforts to come to terms with his melancholy, including a poem he published on suicide and his unpublished writings on the value of personal--and national--suffering. By consciously shifting his goal away from personal contentment (which he realized he could not attain) and toward universal justice, Lincoln gained the strength and insight that he, and America, required to transcend profound darkness.
 

Contents

Introduction
PART ONE
7
The Community Said He Was Crazy
9
A Fearful Gift
24
I Am Now the Most Miserable Man Living
41
PART TWO
65
A SelfMade Man
67
A Misfortune Not a Fault
79
PART THREE
125
The Fiery Trial Through Which We Pass
157
Comes Wisdom to Us
189
Epilogue
209
What Everybody Knows
219
Notes
242
Bibliography
298
Acknowledgments
321

The Reign of Reason
95
The Vents of My Moods and Gloom
110
Index
326
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and independent scholar whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and in the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, New Republic, the Economist, U.S. News and World Report, and other publications. His book, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, has won awards from the Abraham Lincoln Institute, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Mental Health Association.

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