I’m an Illi­nois girl, raised in the very heart of the “land of Lin­coln.” Grow­ing up, I often bicy­cled out to the old Lin­coln place — the farm Abra­ham and his par­ents set­tled when they moved to the state back in 1830. I thought noth­ing of clam­ber­ing over the rot­ting log cab­in or explor­ing the crum­bling root cel­lar. Some­times, I rode the extra half mile to the Shiloh Ceme­tery to eat peanut but­ter crack­ers while lean­ing against step­moth­er Sarah’s and father Tom’s head­stones. Oth­er times, I ped­aled over to the fair­grounds where Lin­coln once debat­ed Stephen A. Dou­glas, or I rest­ed on the cool, green grass of the coun­ty cour­t­house — the same place Abra­ham had prac­ticed law when rid­ing the Eighth Cir­cuit. Occa­sion­al­ly, I spent the night at my friend Emi­ly’s house. Lin­coln had once slept in what lat­er became her bed­room, and we often lay awake hop­ing to catch a glimpse of his ghost. Some­times we asked our friend Karen to join us. Karen was a dis­tant cousin of Lin­coln, and I could­n’t help but won­der if shar­ing a piz­za with her was like shar­ing one with our six­teenth pres­i­dent. then, of course, there was the annu­al field trip to Spring­field; every Octo­ber, my class­mates and I board­ed the school bus that would car­ry us along the Lin­coln Her­itage Trail to the state cap­i­tal, some sev­en­ty miles away. Yet again, I traipsed through the Lin­coln tomb. Encoun­ter­ing his bust out­side the gravesite, I always rubbed his big bronze nose for good luck. At the Lin­coln Sou­venir Shop, I bought yet anoth­er stovepipe hat pen­cil sharp­en­er. Then I climbed back on the bus and head­ed home, feel­ing as if I had just vis­it­ed an old friend.

A few years ago, when my edi­tor sug­gest­ed I write a biog­ra­phy of Abra­ham Lin­coln, I hes­i­tat­ed. Per­haps because Lin­coln was so famil­iar to me, I’d nev­er con­sid­ered writ­ing about him. Still, as I began read­ing books and arti­cles, that old child­hood feel­ing of con­nect­ed­ness began creep­ing over me. Sud­den­ly, I longed to peel away the lay­ers of myth and sym­bol and pro­duce a close, inti­mate por­trait of the man. More than any­thing, I want­ed to reveal the real Abra­ham Lin­coln. But how?

I dove into the wealth of Lin­coln mate­r­i­al — let­ters, diaries, news­pa­pers — and encoun­tered Mary. I admit I did­n’t know much about his wife when I first began this project. Cer­tain­ly, I’d heard sto­ries about her extrav­a­gant spend­ing sprees, her vio­lent tem­per tantrums, her time in an insane asy­lum. Yet few peo­ple know the whole truth that for all her faults, Mary Lin­coln was bril­liant and rest­less, her life a string of tragedies, her spir­it amaz­ing­ly resilient. She and her hus­band were so inex­tri­ca­bly found that a Spring­field friend once said, “they were like two pine trees that had grown so close their roots were for­ev­er intertwined.”