In 1954 Donald edited Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P Chase, and in 1960 edited Why the North Won the Civil War and revised an edition of his Lincoln essays. Although he claimed he originally found Lincoln a tedious subject, Donald's studies of Lincoln's relationships to people close to him would lead him to conclude that he was ambitious, politically shrewd and "much more sensitive and human than I had thought before". He began teaching at Columbia, in New York, and in 1947 published his first book, Lincoln Reconsidered, a collection of essays which was followed in 1948 by Lincoln's Herndon, a study of William Henry Herndon, Lincoln's Illinois law partner and biographer. He graduated from Millsaps College, in Jackson, Mississippi, then received his PhD in history in 1946 from the University of Illinois, studying under the civil war scholar James G Randall.
He also considered himself a frustrated novelist, saying biographies ought to "let the story tell itself and have it as ambiguous, as ambivalent as a modern novel".ĭonald was born on a farm in Goodman, Mississippi. Like Wolfe, Donald was a southerner transplanted to the world of Yankee intellectuals, and spent his career examining the great divide between north and south. It was a more personal project because, as Donald put it, "Wolfe told my story". He won his second Pulitzer for Look Homeward, his 1987 biography of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, author of the 1929 classic Look Homeward, Angel.
By the time the second volume was published in 1970, influenced by changes brought on by the civil rights movement, Donald's Sumner was more of a visionary moral leader. The first was in 1961 for the opening part of his two-volume biography of the abolitionist Charles Sumner, who he presented as a radical whose Republican leadership placed Lincoln in an almost untenable position.
Although he twice won the Pulitzer prize, neither award honoured his work on Lincoln.
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