Lincoln: The Twain Of Our Politics
'For Lincoln, words mattered immensely. His increasing skill in their use during his lifetime, and his high valuation of their power, mark him as the one president who was both a national leader and a genius with language at a time when its power and integrity mattered more than it does today. His was a personality and a career forged in a crucible of language. The novelist William Dean Howell's claim about his friend Mark Twain, that he was the "Lincoln of our literature," can effectively be rephrased with the focus on our 16th president: Lincoln was the Twain of our politics. Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his contemporary audience or posterity with equal and enduring effectiveness.'
--from the introduction to Fred Kaplan's Lincoln--The Biography of a Writer, one of the more interesting new entrants to the endless stream of books that continue to add to our understanding of our greatest president.