This year for Christmas my daughter gifted me
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years by Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was a poet and reporter who grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, the site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate. Born in 1878, Sandburg had access to people who had personal knowledge of Lincoln. Sandburg planned and worked on his biography of Lincoln for decades, publishing
The prairie Years (2 volumes) in 1926, and
The War Years (4 volumes) in 1942. He later produced a condensed edition in 1954, which is the version that seems to be currently available electronically to some lucky people. It's hard to get an electronic version; available at amazon.com as an MP3 CD, and Barnes & Noble as a Nook book. Amazon Canada and Kobo Canada sing not the Sandburg electric. Maybe some public benefactor will produce an ebook in 2042 (Sandburg died in 1967), unless copyright gets extended again to life plus 500 or some other reasonable extension
. I've wanted to read it for decades, and consider myself fortunate to have gotten the full version, even if in a 1926 printing on disintegrating chemical pulp.
It is the best biography I have read of Lincoln's formative years, ending with his farewell speech at Springfield as his train takes him east to Washington, death, and glory. If you ever feel the need to read a biography of Lincoln which attempts to explain him as a person, this is the one. The depth of detail and the literary quality (Sandburg had two poetry Pulitzers) are outstanding.