About the author
Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American historian and biographer of political leadership. Her books often use several intertwined lives to show how temperament, rivalry, family experience, and institutional pressure enter public decisions.
Doris Kearns Goodwin reconstructs their separate rises through law, party politics, ambition, family, failure, and the crisis over slavery. Those biographies explain the rivalries Lincoln inherited when he appointed Seward, Chase, and Bates to his cabinet.
Where to start
Start with Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Doris Kearns Goodwin follows Lincoln and the three better-known rivals he brought into his cabinet during the Civil War.
