He was much more sensitive and human than I had thought before.”ĭonald married Aida DiPace in 1955 and had one child, Bruce Randall. And I watched the way he worked with people and what an extraordinarily adept politician he was. “As I grew older, I realized the jokes and stories he told were really very funny and they always had a point to them.

“When I started out, I wasn’t interested in Lincoln, and frankly found him a tiresome old fellow who was rather long-winded, told too many stories, was kind of a rough, frontier sort,” said Donald, who dismissed more recent theories that Lincoln was gay or chronically depressed.

In such classic essays as “Getting Right With Lincoln” and “The Folklore Lincoln,” he noted Lincoln’s transformation from laughingstock to saint upon his assassination and the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to claim him for their parties.ĭuring a 2005 interview with the Associated Press, Donald acknowledged that his feelings about Lincoln, too, had changed. “Lincoln’s Herndon” began as a dissertation and became Donald’s first book, published in 1948.ĭonald’s reputation grew throughout the next few decades as he carefully picked apart the Lincoln myths dear to poets, dreamers and politicians. But he also needed money and found a job working as a research assistant to a leading Lincoln scholar, James Garfield Randall.ĭonald’s mentor encouraged him to write about Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon. Having grown up in a segregated town, he was interested in race relations and planned to study the post-Civil War era. He majored in history and sociology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., then went to the University of Illinois for graduate school. His books included “Lincoln,” a single-volume biography of the president published in 1995 “Lincoln at Home,” a study of his family life and “We Are Lincoln Men,” essays about Lincoln’s friends and associates.ĭonald, the grandson of a Union cavalry officer, was born into a farming family in Goodman, Miss., in 1920. Donald published his first Lincoln book in the late 1940s and kept at it for more than 50 years.

Lincoln biography david herbert donald