Civil War Scholar Became Leading Lincoln Biographer

David Herbert Donald, a historian and biographer who won two Pulitzer Prizes and was a preeminent scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, died May 17 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston while awaiting heart surgery. He was 88 and lived on Lincoln Road in Lincoln, Mass.

Dr. Donald was a longtime professor of history at Harvard and other universities, but he gained a wide readership beyond the academy with his thorough and gracefully written biographies. He wrote three books about Lincoln, and his 714-page magnum opus from 1995, titled simply "Lincoln," is widely considered the definitive one-volume biography.

Tearing away more than a century of encrusted sentiment about Lincoln, Dr. Donald portrayed him as a shrewd intellectual rather than as a folksy but charming bumpkin who stumbled into public life at just the right moment.

"When I started out, I wasn't interested in Lincoln, and frankly found him a tiresome old fellow who was rather long-winded," Dr. Donald said in a 2005 interview with the Associated Press. "As I grew older, I realized . . . what an extraordinarily adept politician he was. . . . He was much more sensitive and human than I had thought before."

Dr. Donald sought to understand Lincoln's psyche in a way few scholars before him had. He explored Lincoln's relationships with his taciturn frontiersman father, with his colleagues and with his emotionally troubled wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. He showed that Lincoln, for all his repute as a rough-hewn rail-splitter, was supremely ambitious and hard-working.

"I was going to try to write a book as though no life of Lincoln had ever been written before," Dr. Donald told C-SPAN host Brian Lamb in 1995. "Second, I wanted it to be a straightforward narrative of what Lincoln did, felt, saw and concluded."

Reviewing "Lincoln" in the Christian Science Monitor, historian Gabor Boritt called Dr. Donald's biography "a masterwork. It stands alone among 135 years of Lincoln biographies." On National Public Radio in February, Civil War historian Eric Foner said "Lincoln" remains the finest biography of the 16th president. "Lincoln" hit the bestseller lists, with hundreds of thousands of copies in print, and won several prestigious academic honors.

Dr. Donald won the Pulitzer in 1961 for "Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War," about the Massachusetts abolitionist and U.S. senator who was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor in 1856 by a political rival. Dr. Donald won his second Pulitzer in 1988 for "Look Homeward," a biography of the volatile Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe, which Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley called "a work of great subtlety and sophistication."

David Herbert Donald was born Oct. 1, 1920, in Goodman, Miss., and grew up on a farm. In his preface to "Look Homeward," he wrote that he was drawn to Wolfe and his conflicted views of the South because "as an adolescent, I . . . read 'Look Homeward, Angel,' and was certain that Thomas Wolfe had told my life story."

He graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., and became interested in Lincoln while a graduate student in history at the University of Illinois. He received a master's degree and PhD in 1942 and 1946, respectively.

He published his first book, "Lincoln's Herndon," about Lincoln's Illinois law partner, William Henry Herndon, in 1948, and quickly became known as a thorough scholar and prolific writer. He taught at Columbia, Princeton and Johns Hopkins universities before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1973. At the time of his death, Dr. Donald was at work on a study of John Quincy Adams.

Survivors include his wife of 53 years, Aida DiPace Donald, the former editor in chief of Harvard University Press, of Lincoln; a son, Bruce Randall Donald of Chapel Hill, N.C.; and two grandchildren.

Beginning with John F. Kennedy, several presidents invited Dr. Donald to the White House to discuss Lincoln and the presidency. By immersing himself in Lincoln's life and thoughts, Dr. Donald had a nuanced understanding of the responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of any president.

In his final completed book, "We Are Lincoln Men" (2004), he wrote of Lincoln: "Surrounded by people all the time, he was the loneliest man in the capital."

Dr. Donald, who wrote or edited more than two dozen books, once called himself a "frustrated novelist." As he wrote, he paused to read each sentence aloud, seeking to strike exactly the right cadence and tone.

"I feel that biography is an art, like a novel," he said in 1995, describing his approach to writing Lincoln's biography. "I thought it important to get the author, me, out of it, to let the story tell itself and have it as ambiguous, as ambivalent as a modern novel."