He Knew Lincoln, and Other Billy Brown Stories

In these charming, intimate sketches, Ida M. Tarbell resurrects a version of Abraham Lincoln that history often forgets: not the martyred president or the Great Emancipator, but the backwoods lawyer who wandered into a small-town drugstore for conversation and laughs. Our guide is Billy Brown, an Illinois druggist with a naturalist's eye for human absurdity and a storyteller's gift for bringing the past alive. Through his fond reminiscences, Lincoln emerges as a man perpetually late for court, riddling with customers, and luxuriating in the easy companionship of men whose "native grain had not been obscured by polish." Written in 1922, when the last witnesses to Lincoln's Illinois years were dying off, this collection functions as both tribute and preservation: a deliberate effort to capture the informal warmth between a leader and the ordinary people who knew him before he became a monument. The writing glows with Tarbell's affection for a vanished world of political talk, human exhibits, and unhurried friendship.