Scenes of Intimacy—Michael Knox Beran

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine, 576 pp., $28)

IN this new book, Daniel Mark Epstein has composed an elegant and insightful study of a well-known couple. The author of several volumes of prose and poetry, among them an outstanding book on Lincoln and Whitman, Epstein uses his poetic gifts to evoke those tender places in the Lincoln marriage that other, less imaginative historians have failed to see. In a characteristic passage he describes how, on a summer night in the Lincoln house in Springfield, the future president extinguished the lamp and came upstairs. He took off his clothing and lay down beside her. He was always a great comfort. They made love under the eaves in the soft fragrant air of June, and soon she was pregnant again.

About the Author

Michael Knox Beran

Michael Knox Beran, a lawyer and writer, is the author of WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

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Abraham Lincoln

The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine, 576 pp., $28)

IN this new book, Daniel Mark Epstein has composed an elegant and insightful study of a well-known couple. The author of several volumes of prose and poetry, among them an outstanding book on Lincoln and Whitman, Epstein uses his poetic gifts to evoke those tender places in the Lincoln marriage that other, less imaginative historians have failed to see. In a characteristic passage he describes how, on a summer night in the Lincoln house in Springfield, the future president extinguished the lamp and came upstairs. He took off his clothing and lay down beside her. He was always a great comfort. They made love under the eaves in the soft fragrant air of June, and soon she was pregnant again.