The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend - Softcover

Walsh, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025207629X ISBN 13: 9780252076299

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2008

Synopsis

In recent decades the Ann Rutledge story has been treated as mythical rather than as an account of Abraham Lincoln's first but doomed love affair. In The Shadows Rise, the first book-length treatment of the subject, John Evangelist Walsh restores Ann Rutledge to her rightful place in the historical record.

In 1945 the noted Lincoln scholar James G. Randall stated in his Lincoln biography that no real evidence existed to confirm Lincoln's love for Ann or the tales of his profound grief at her early death. Later, in the 1990s, John Y. Simon and Douglas Wilson began the rehabilitation of Rutledge with a reexamination of Herndon's papers.

Now, in The Shadows Rise, Walsh transcends and transforms recent research, re-creating the Lincoln-Rutledge story in all its dramatic fullness and depth. Along with new material and new interpretations he supplies some old-fashioned common sense. Highlights include convincing reconstructions of Lincoln's New Salem friends and Walsh's fresh examination of the Mary Owens affair, in which Lincoln's offer of marriage was refused.

About this title

About the Author:

John Evangelist Walsh is the author of more than twenty books, including Moonlight: Abraham Lincoln and the Almanac Trial. The winner of an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his book Poe the Detective, Walsh lives in Monroe, Wisconsin.

Review:

"The most detailed study of the Abraham Lincoln-Ann Rutledge relationship yet written. Carefully researched and convincingly argued, it should set to rest once and for all the widespread misconception that Lincoln's first love affair was a myth or that the sudden death of Ann Rutledge was an incident of little importance in his early life." Douglas Wilson, co-editor of an edition of Herdon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln "The Shadows Rise documents his periods of depression. Walsh recreates Lincoln's affair with Ann Rutledge, his first love. His moods seem to have been particularly severe after her death - though Walsh concludes that Rutledge died from typhoid, not, as was long supposed, the mortification of being torn between two men whose hands she had accepted."-Jurek Martin, Financial Times, 31st Jan 2009

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 025207629X
• ISBN 13: 9780252076299
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224