<DIV>Tracing the historic arc of Abraham Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young man in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews to the familiar Lincoln saga, seamlessly braiding Lincoln family members and military figures with a parade of fictional extras - wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, patriotic whores, and dying soldiers. Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln's own letters and speeches, Jerome Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons - Robert, Willie, and Tad - is explored with penetrating psychological insight, utmost compassion, and the most ingenious novelistic license.</div>