"Deep in the wilderness down in Kentucky there stood a cabin built of roughly hewn logs. It was a poor little cabin of only one room. The February wind tore at the clumsy door and made it rattle on its leather hinges. Just a glimmer of daylight sifted in through the oiled deer hide stretched across the single window frame . . . . And here it was that Abraham Lincoln first saw the world on a Sunday morning. It wasn't much of a house in which he was born, but it was just as good as most people had in Kentucky in 1809".

And from this wilderness beginning the d'Aulaires have recreated in flowing text and distinguished lithographs a very human Abraham Lincoln—first the little Abe, solemn as a papoose, toddling after his father's plow; then the boy, walking through the deep woods to a distant school house, chopping timber, splitting rails, growing always taller and thinner; and then the young man of the prairie years—the "Honest Abe" who was to go finally, as the New Orleans fortune teller had foretold, to the White House, and there bring his country through a civil war.

The d'Aulaires have wanted to do a picture book of Lincoln ever since the did their beautiful book, GEORGE WASHINGTON. They read everything they could find about Lincoln's life, his sayings and his ways, and also about the period in which he lived. The finished book with its richly glowing lithographs is as deeply American as the little boy and the man it depicts—and a perfect introduction to one of our most loved Americans.

For boys and girls up to 10.

From the dust jacket