Abraham Lincoln

This picture biography follows Abraham Lincoln from a boyhood spent in a one room log cabin on the frontier, splitting rails and reading borrowed books by firelight, through his early jobs as a store clerk and surveyor, his years as a lawyer and legislator in Illinois, and finally his presidency through the Civil War to his assassination. Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire built the book's warm, folk styled color plates using lithography, drawing each image directly onto the printing surface rather than painting on paper, a slow process that gives the pictures a soft, grainy texture unlike anything produced with a brush. The couple worked as true partners on every page, and the result reads as a single consistent style rather than two hands visible on the page.

The text moves quickly through Lincoln's life in short, plain sentences suited to a young reader following one figure across decades rather than a single afternoon, and the book works well read over several sittings, one stretch of Lincoln's life at a time, rather than start to finish in one go. It presents Lincoln as approachable and homespun, a poor boy who taught himself, and that framing makes the sweep of Civil War era history legible to children who have no prior context for it, though it also smooths over the era's harder complexities in favor of a single admiring portrait. The d'Aulaires would return to this same picture biography format again and again across their career, but Lincoln was where they first proved it could carry a Caldecott Medal.