Tài liệu Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer docx

[...]... impressing American sailors, hardly mattered to Western enthusiasts and to the Democratic-Republican Party: the war was an affirmation of nationalism, a reassertion of American independence, and a spur to further western expansion It became the basis of Jackson’s [ 14 ] Fred Kapla n popularity At six years of age, Abraham may have cheered the general and the victory The impression slavery made on him as a child... An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig “Commerce” with an Account of the Sufferings of the Surviving Of cers and Crew Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs, on the African Desert It was a harrowing and dramatic true story that gave vivid specificity and a white man’s voice to the horror of what it meant to be a slave Published in 1817 and frequently reprinted, it appealed to American... American curiosity about the Arab world and exotic Africa Its account of suffering, slavery, and freedom attained [ 28 ] Fred Kapla n against formidable obstacles had its attraction both as an adventure story and as an embodiment of American ingenuity, courage, and talent It is narrated in the first person by a man of high moral character who never forsakes his humanistic loyalty to his crew He regularly... popular drama, was to have some of the same value for him The Arabian Nights of his boyhood provided brief pleasure, and then he moved on, never to be a fan of fiction of any sort, including the dominant literary genre of his age, the novel It is possible that he did read a small number of novels, and he was familiar with the names of many of his famous novelistic contemporaries, particularly Charles... circumstances, though for the son the totality was subsumed into a sense of his father’s character It was not a character that he admired And it was one that he needed later to distance himself from Thomas Lincoln “was not a lazy man,” a contemporary of Abraham’s remembered, but a piddler—always doing but doing nothing great—was happy—lived Easy—and contented Had but few wants and Supplied these.” Both father... democratic vote Preachers preached Calvinist dogma was asserted The cast of mood and expectation about this life and the next were formed Life was depicted as a battleground between good and evil impulses, and human destiny was in God’s hands Indeed, since Adam’s fall had sealed human fate in this world forever, earth was a vale of tears where men had to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows and... less remarkable to his son than what the boy took to be his father’s disinterest in learning to read and his lack of ambition in general It left him a marginal man who at an early age had fallen out of the mainstream of American upward mobility, a plodder without ambition to rise in the world But he had not been born to that necessity The father that the young adult Lincoln knew had been substantially... father’s views In contrast to Jackson, Clay seemed an embodiment of the cultured citizen whom the young autodidact would like to become, an articulate master of language, reason, and logic L i ncol n [ 25 ] Now, in the early 1820s, reading biography for the first time, he became fascinated by Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Mason L Weems’s Life of Washington Narrative biography was the dominant... him an excellent speller A few years later, in 1818, when he attended his third school, “we had Spelling Matches frequently,” a schoolmate recalled, “Abe always ahead of all the classes he Ever was in.” Grammar came more slowly, probably because of the gap between Dilworth’s rules and the colloquial grammar of everyone around Abraham The textbook’s examples of correct grammar would have seemed like the. .. but the lazy, may support at least, if not enrich themselves.” In search of vocation, Lincoln sampled a variety of employments In the main, he became a lawyer-businessman, a frugal lender rather than a borrower, who believed that free labor was man’s supreme self-definition and that all capital resulted from the sweat of the physical and mental brow Dilworth urged boys to take the busy ants as their model, . enthusiasts and to the Democratic-Republican Party: the war was a n affirmation of nationalism, a reassertion of American independence, and a spur to further. Thomas was not sent to school, even to learn arithmetic. A manual laborer as a teenager, then a carpen- ter, and then a farmer, he managed sustenance and