"I wrote the life of Lincoln which elected him," remarked William Dean Howells to Mark Twain in 1876. Howells had just contracted for a campaign biography of Rutherford B. Hayes and was humorously recalling the past to his friend. In 1860 Howells, then a young man of twenty-three, was working as an editorial writer on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus. Except for a book of poems, "The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin" was the first of the one hundred and three boo...