Alexander Bliss and John Kennedy created Autograph Leaves of our Country's Authors as a fundraiser for the aid of soldiers and their families. Includes the first facsimile of the handwritten Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg. Facsimiles of works by other important 19th Century authors include: Francis Scott Key, Edward Everett, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Audubon, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others.

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Describes the events surrounding Abraham Lincoln's historic speech following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, how he responded to the politics of the time, and the importance of that speech.

"Revealed here is an unknown Melville, the autodidact who made himself a poet and who brilliantly constructed a personal aesthetic credo. Dispelling baseless claims that Melville had a quarrel with fiction after Moby-Dick (or Pierre) and that he did not, in 1860, complete a book he called Poems, Parker offers new evidence of the full trajectory of Melville's career in all its glory and frustration."--BOOK JACKET.