Abraham Lincoln: The War Years was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1939 in four volumes and won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940. Together with The Prairie Years, the complete biography runs to six volumes and over a million words — Sandburg spent thirty years on the project.
The War Years covers Lincoln’s presidency from his inauguration through his assassination at Ford’s Theatre. Sandburg’s method remains biographical-poetic rather than academic-analytical: he renders cabinet meetings, battlefield reports, political debates, and private conversations with novelistic vividness, drawing on thousands of letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents.
The scale of the work and the quality of its prose placed Sandburg alongside Boswell and Lockhart in the tradition of great English-language biography. Professional historians continued to object — Sandburg’s Lincoln was too perfect, too wise, too purely good — but the work’s influence on popular understanding of Lincoln was incalculable. For a generation of Americans, Sandburg’s Lincoln was Lincoln.
Collecting Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1939): Four volumes, boards with dust jackets. Signed limited edition of 525 copies in slipcase.
Market values:
- Trade first edition, all four volumes in jackets: $150–$400
- Signed limited edition in slipcase: $500–$1,500
- Complete six-volume set (Prairie + War): $200–$600