Children's Books

[RJNorton]

Wonderful post, Gene!

[Gene C]

Out Of The Wilderness by Virginia Eifert
Copyright 1956 with about 210 pages. 13 nice illustrations by Manning Dee V. Lee

The book aimed for the 8-14 year old age group covers for the most part, Lincoln's life in Indiana.
Many of the events she writes about are not true, but some of them are. She does a nice job of mixing in the people Lincoln knew as characters in her stories.
I was very disappointed in how she portrays Thomas Lincoln, but this is a fairly common practice when Ms. Eifert wrote this. In this book Thomas has very few redeeming qualities. Dennis Hanks is portrayed as a young man who frequently gets in trouble for drinking, and a lazy loafer. Squire Hall, Lincoln's cousin who marries step-sister Tilda Johnson, is characterized as "low account"

One of the sections I enjoyed had to do with the big freeze the winter after they moved to Illinois and when Lincoln almost seriously froze his feet. Ms. Eifert has a tendency to overembellish some of the details in these stories in a manner I didn't care for.
https://archive.org/details/outofwildern...ew=theater
(bottom of page 203-210. You'll have to sign up/in to borrow this book from Internet Archives, but I haven't received any junk emails for doing this)

You can find copies to purchase on Amazon or ABE Books.
https://www.amazon.com/Out-Wilderness-Vi..._author_dp