Abraham LIncoln has long engaged our historians and public intellectuals. Of late he has stimulated our artists as well.
The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain's most prestigious, was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which imaginatively recreates the night the grief-stricken president visited the crypt holding his beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dead of typhoid at age 11.
Here is a review in praise by the New Times' venerable Michiko Kakutani, who pointed out how much Saunder's novel drew inspiration from Edgar Lee Masters' Sponn River Anthology. Another rave came from Hari Kunzru in the Guardian. A less approving take from Caleb Crain appeared in The Atlantic.
