The Man Who Wrote the Man Who Killed Lincoln

[Dave Taylor]

Yesterday in the mail I got copies of some of Philip Van Doren Stern's material from the University of Oregon's Special Collections. Stern was the author of the 1939 book, The Man Who Killed Lincoln. Though written as fiction, Stern did a lot of in depth research on the matter as his background was in journalism. The materials I received weren't what I was expecting. It is mostly correspondences with Stern regarding the publication and advertising of his book, but there were still a few interesting tid bits like the letter regarding Edwin Pitts I posted on my blog.

While most letters applaud Stern for his book, there is letter sent to Stern while he was assumedly shopping the book around for a publisher. Random House loved the book and bought it up quickly, but an executive at Simon and Schuster hated it and tore the book apart:

"Dear Phill
I have read your book carefully. It is a perfectly competent job but I do not see why you wrote it. It doesn't seem to me that there was any necessity for such a book. The facts of the assassination and capture are pretty well known and the very minor importance of the event has been pretty well assessed at this time.If you had brought to the job some really profound interpretation of Booth's character or some hitherto unknown facts or the kind of passionate detail we find in the early Feuchtwanger, then all would have been OK. But it seems to me that Booth's character is so simple and at the same time so stupid that not even a genius could make him interesting. As far as I can see, he is simply a fanatical southern patriot with a vague oedipus complex plus a desire for self-exhibition. These three traits are so easily brought out that once you have done so in the first twenty or thirty pages, there is nothing left to do except the business of striaght narrative. This in itself would be thrilling enough if the story was not so well known. But, after all, we know perfectly well that Lincoln is going to be assassinated and Booth captured. For me therefore, the book is a failure through no fault of your own. I just can't understand why an intelligent person like yourself should waste his time on a silly and childish fool like Booth."

The letter goes on, giving specific page numbers and criticisms. Stern sent a reply to the executive first thanking him for his revisions, and then defending the need for a book. He took, "violent exception" to two of the executive's points: that the assassination of Lincoln was of "minor importance", and that the story is so well known that it is not worth telling.

"Come, come, Kip!" Stern writes, "You can't really be such a devotee of the invented fictional plot as to believe that the reader can be interested only in being kept on the tenterhooks because he doesn't know whether the hero will arrive in time to pull Little Nell off the railroad tracks before the locomotive crushes her tender white body"

Stern ends his rightfully defensive letter with the following, "A more ungrateful letter than this would be hard to imagine. And yet I do appreciate your reading the manuscript and your revision suggestions are invaluable. I just couldn't resist the opportunity to answer back to an unfavorable reviewer before the book is published. After it comes out custom decrees that it is only decent for the author to maintain a glum silence."

Thank goodness more people didn't feel as this Simon and Schuster executive. Stern's book sold quite well, was excerpted in Reader's Digest (a big score for publicity), and was turned into radio dramas and a stage show. A couple times it looked like it would be turned into a movie, but that never came to fruition.

Stern would go on to write more on Lincoln (The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln) and the Civil War (An End to Valor: The Last Days of the Civil War), but is most remembered today for his Christmas short story, "The Greatest Gift", which was turned into the classic holiday film, It's a Wonderful Life.