Albert Jeremiah Beveridge (1862-1927) was a Republican politician who served Indiana as a U.S. Senator from 1899 to 1911. At the close of his political career he turned to writing history. His 4-volume Life of John Marshall, completed in 1919, won a Pulitzer Prize. He then worked on this biography of Lincoln, having it substantially complete by the time of his death in 1927. Beveridge considered these two biographies, of Marshall and Lincoln, as a continuous “institutional history” of the United States.