“No element of Lincoln’s character,” declared his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.”
I’ve been reading Joshua Wolf Shenk‘s absorbing book on Abraham Lincoln’s depression entitled Lincoln’s Melancholy. I’m not sure how many people know that Lincoln suffered from lifelong depression (it was essentially dismissed by an influential biographer in the 1940s), but those of us with depression could see it written clearly on his face.