![]() nobody has attempted to write another life of Herndon.” ![]() In 1988, forty years after the publication of Donald’s Lincoln’s Herndon: A Biography, the author declared that his book “has held up surprisingly well.” Readers, he claimed, “have detected very few errors” and “my interpretation of Herndon. He was a larger-than-life figure and a remarkable, if mercurial, mentor. Although thereafter we had little to do with each other, I will always be grateful to him for the exceptional kindness he showed me as an undergraduate and for the rigor of his pedagogy, from which I learned a great deal. Toward the end of my graduate career, we-like many other mentors and protégés-had a falling out. When he left Princeton in 1962 to take a position at Johns Hopkins, I stayed in touch and, upon graduation, followed him to Baltimore and pursued my PhD under his direction. ![]() Later that year he hired me as his research assistant, and we became quite close. ![]() ![]() A brilliant teacher as well as a gifted writer and a diligent scholar, Donald mesmerized me with his scintillating lectures and lively preceptorials when I was a freshman at Princeton in 1961. In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell a bit about my relationship with David Herbert Donald, whose biography of Herndon is examined in this article. ![]()
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