“I’ve had a great time with Lincoln,” Harold Holzer says. “I’ve managed to write all these books.” He has written, co-written or edited more than 50, most concerning Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US president who steered the union through the civil war, ended slavery in 1863 and was killed two years later. Holzer is a familiar face on television and has curated exhibitions and works for the stage. In 2008, George W Bush gave him the National Humanities Medal.
And yet Holzer is not a full-time historian. Once a Democratic operative, he was also a newspaper reporter and editor and an executive in public TV and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before he became director of Roosevelt House, a public policy institute at Hunter College in New York.
