Herndon's Lincoln; the true story of a great life; The history and personal recollections of Abraham Lincoln; Vol. II; pp. 205-418

Herndon's Lincoln; The True Story Of A Great Life - is the second volume biographical series, which was published in 1921 and written by William Henry Herndon and Jesse William Weik. William Henry Herndon was a legal partner as well as a biographer of President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life first appeared in a three-volume edition in 1889 published by Belford, Clarke & Company. Much of the actual writing was by Jesse William Wake, who has received full credit as a co-writer. The book received highly mixed reviews due to its inclusion of such unvarnished elements as Lincoln's mother's illegitimacy (and even rumors of Lincoln's own illegitimacy), its sometimes viciously negative depiction of Herndon's longtime enemy Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's suicidal depression, and other tales about a tortured president who was quickly becoming the most revered and romanticized figure in American history. The volumes in this series are presented as faithful reproductions of the original Herndon's Lincoln. Here the bulk of the work is faithful to the original, line by line and word for word.