Background
Team of Rivals is the sixth book by American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. In 1995, Goodwin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, a similar study of personalities in the Roosevelt White House.
Goodwin spent ten years on the research and writing of Team of Rivals. She stated that she had been inspired to tell the stories of the four men (Seward, Chase, Bates, and Lincoln) together when realizing that the cabinet members had written extensive diaries and letters that might provide a "new angle" in Lincoln studies.
During Goodwin's work on Team of Rivals, a plagiarism scandal erupted over unmarked quotations in Goodwin's 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Goodwin stated that in dealing with the scandal, during which she had to apologize and make an out-of-court settlement to author Lynne McTaggart, she found Lincoln a consolation, particularly his philosophy "not to waste precious energies on recriminations about the past". In a 2012 interview, Goodwin cited early 20th-century muckraker Ida Tarbell on the pleasures of writing about Lincoln: "Somebody asked her, why do so many people write about Lincoln? And she said, because he’s so companionable. And I think somehow that's been true for me."
Read more about this topic: Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln
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