Critics have considered Robert E. Sherwood’s drama Abe Lincoln in Illinois to be a labor of love, and an important part of the mythology that defines the American character, but the general consensus among serious critics is that it is not a very well-crafted piece. Even before this play was produced, Eleanor Flexner identified several repetitive aspects of Sherwood’s plots. ‘‘A man—wise, cynical, and charming— finds the answer to his quest for the meaning of life, in a woman; suddenly he falls in love, no less suddenly his life is wrenched from its old pattern, and in three cases out of four he goes gallantly to his death in consequence.’’ She went on to identify the background of war as a device that Sherwood used for sustaining tension, ‘‘a device forced upon him by his inability to construct a play in which the suspense will arise from the actions of the characters themselves.’’ Flexner found these plot elements overextended in 1938, and it is unlikely that she would have found much changed in Abe Lincoln In Illinois, from the title character’s doomed but enno bling love for Ann Rutledge to his own impending fate.

When the play was produced, critical responses were mixed. It was immensely popular, running on Broadway for 472 performances, longer than any of Sherwood’s other works, and it was successfully adapted to a movie in 1940, for which Sherwood wrote the script. Many critics accepted it, as audiences did, as an entertaining dramatization of the old legends, and these critics endorsed the play enthusiastically, but with the slightly condescending sense that viewing it would be one’s civic duty. More thoughtful critics, however, held the play to a higher standard, and these writers seemed to find it their reluctant duty to point out its flaws. Even Carl Sandburg, whose three-volume biography of Lincoln was one of Sherwood’s main biographical sources, seemed to choose his words of praise very carefully. Instead of saying that Sherwood has done a fine job of translating Lincoln’s life to the stage, Sandburg tells readers that Sherwood was conscious of using good sources and also of the fact that he needed to change some facts for dramatic purpose. The introduction continued with further evasion, telling readers that Sherwood’s play ‘‘carries some shine of the American dream,’’ that it ‘‘delivers great themes of human wit, behavior and freedom.’’ What was lacking, in this discussion of Sherwood’s methods, was any statement that it is consistently good.

Sandburg implied that the play bends reality too much for the sake of popularity—his only criticism of a more accurate drama is that people might not go ‘‘to see or value it as a drama.’’ Other critics, in contrast, have found that Sherwood did not take enough dramatic license with his biographical material. Francis Fergusson, writing in the Southern Review, felt that the play offered a succession of elements of the Lincoln legend without ever coming together as a unified work of art. ‘‘We never get the immediate sense of actuality which good drama gives and which comes from the vitality and dramatic necessity of each character and the imaginative consistency of the whole,’’ he wrote. The facts of Lincoln’s life, Fergusson wrote, just were not enough to tell the story: ‘‘they may be history, they may be souvenirs, but they are not drama.’’ He noted that Sherwood’s supporting characters, such as Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, ‘‘owe their existence to the books, they have no life of their own.’’ They are ‘‘perfunctory, like the Martha Washington in the school pageant.’’

After Sherwood’s death, a critical biography...