Abraham Lincoln was reluctant to speak or write about his childhood, and it was reportedly only out of gratitude for the support of John L. Scripps’s employer, the Chicago Press & Tribune, that he penned fourteen pages of autobiographical notes. Lincoln stressed his poor and humble beginnings, and he resisted all attempts at political glamorization. Scripps’s thirty-two-page campaign biography was published simultaneously in pamphlet form by the Press & Tribune and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, under slightly different titles.

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A. now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year—He never was in a College or Academy as a student; and never inside of a College or Academy building till since he had a law license—What he has in the way of education he has picked up—After he was twenty–three, and had separated from his father, he studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now did does