To my amused bemused wise wry dad Jim Doyle, who quietly said to me one sunny Florida morning, “You know, those little stories and drawings you do about your years in Chicago, you ought to walk them out into a novel,” which was the proximate spark of the book in your hand; to my friend and former Chicago-journalism colleague Cathy O’Connell-Cahill at U.S. Catholic magazine in Chicago, whose appreciation of my stories and silly drawings, and pinning of them on her cubicle wall until the whole place was papered with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky, was an engine of all this; to my friend the masterful Boston businessman Christopher Conkey, for assistance in financial arcana; to the glorious two-volume set Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858 (volume one) and 1859–1865 (volume two), in which I swim all the time, always to my benefit; to the works of Harry Mark Petrakis and Saul Bellow and Robert Casey and Mike Royko, which told me piercing true stories about the city of Chicago; to Carl Sandburg, whose biography of Lincoln remains the best by an American (I think), and to the wonderful Welsh brilliance Jan Morris, whose Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest is the best by an un-American (I know); to John Feister, editor of St. Anthony Messenger magazine, published by the Franciscan Friars of Ohio, who printed a version of the Muirin chapter of this book as the story “Born of the Sea”; to Leslee Goodman, editor of Moon magazine, who published a version of the Het chapter in her absorbing periodical; to my friend Karen Randolph, who found me an apartment in Chicago many years ago, and to my friend Christopher Doherty, who lived there with me for one hilarious summer of basketball and baked potatoes; and to my friend Eric Freeze, now a professor at Wabash College, in Indiana, who, while teaching at Eureka College, in Illinois, brought me to that loamy campus, where I sat, deeply moved, in the chapel where Abraham Lincoln had walked and spoken in 1856, and I felt some electric awe and pride and sadness and thrill for which even now I struggle to find words. I kid you not when I say you could almost see Lincoln walking through the crowd, a head taller than everyone else, his face filled with gaunt pride and sadness and humor and pain.
He spoke there in the fall, when he was weary of politicking, and according to legend he spoke his mind without notes or text, so there is no written record, but I like to think that he spoke ringingly of grace and justice and courage and humility, and that when he was finished there was a long silence, as listeners mulled his clear unadorned words and the passionate honesty and humility of the man who had spoken them, and then there was a roar of applause through which Abraham Lincoln walked like Moses walking through the walls of the sea.