Abe" Lincoln's Anecdotes and Stories: A Collection of the Best Stories Told by Lincoln Which Made Him Famous as America's Best Story Teller

Lincoln the storyteller has been overshadowed by Lincoln the martyr. But his contemporaries knew him as something else: the funniest man in America. This 1908 collection preserves 150 anecdotes that reveal the president as his constituents knew him - a backwoods lawyer with a mind like a trap and a mouth that could make a dying man smile. The anecdotes span his life, from the log cabin to the White House. Here is Lincoln dueling with words against political rivals, gently mocking his own gaunt appearance, keeping a dying nation together with humor when despair would have been easier. These are stories told by people who heard them straight from the source, not polished monuments to greatness but rough, warm, human glimpses of a man who understood that laughter was sometimes the only honest answer to suffering. If you think you know Lincoln from textbooks and statues, you don't know the half of it.