# Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders' first novel and was a New York Times bestseller.
The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie Lincoln, focusing on Lincoln's grief and the spirits trapped in the bardo, a transitional space between life and death.
It received critical acclaim and won the 2017 Booker Prize.

## Plot

Lincoln in the Bardo is set in 1862, unfolding over a single night following the death of Willie Lincoln. As Abraham Lincoln mourns at his son's crypt, he unwittingly enters a supernatural realm inhabited by spirits unable to move on due to unresolved attachments. The spirits, including Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and Reverend Everly Thomas, narrate the story through fragmented monologues. They observe Lincoln's grief and attempt to help Willie transition to the afterlife, fearing that his lingering attachment to his father may trap him in this state indefinitely.
In a climactic sequence, the spirits briefly inhabit Lincoln's body, experiencing his grief while urging him to let go of Willie. This moment allows many of them to confront their own deaths and transition through a phenomenon called "matterlightblooming." Willie ultimately accepts his fate and departs, enabling Lincoln to begin healing.

## Conception and research
### Background

The novel was inspired by a story Saunders's wife's cousin told him about how Lincoln visited his son Willie's crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown on several occasions to hold the body, a story that seems to be verified by contemporary newspaper accounts. In March 2017, Saunders provided more detail on the background and conception of his novel:
   Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife's cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt "on several occasions" to hold the boy's body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn't getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read "Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt", decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt [...].
   Without giving anything away, let me say this: I made a bunch of ghosts. They were sort of cynical; they were stuck in this realm, called the bardo (from the Tibetan notion of a sort of transitional purgatory between rebirths), stuck because they'd been unhappy or unsatisfied in life. The greatest part of their penance is that they feel utterly inessential – incapable of influencing the living.
Saunders first announced the novel in a 2015 New York Times interview with the novelist Jennifer Egan, revealing that it would have a "supernatural element" while remaining "ostensibly historical". The novel's title was announced in a conversation between Saunders and Susan Sarandon in Interview magazine, in April 2016. That same month, a description of the book was posted on the Random House website.

### Development

Saunders did not originally intend to write a novel (and had avoided doing so in the past), but the story of Lincoln cradling his son's body stayed with him, and he eventually decided to write about it. The novel began as a single section, and was fleshed out over time.
To produce the book, Saunders conducted extensive research on Lincoln and the Civil War, consulting, among other books, Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962). Saunders rearranged historical sources to get at the "necessary historical facts", and included excerpts from them in the novel. Many of these sources are cited in the book, along with some fictional ones.
In a The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast with David Remnick, Saunders described how a melancholic Lincoln the Mystic statue, sculpted by James Earle Fraser, propelled him through the novel. The statue is in front of his office at Syracuse University, near the Tolley Hall.
Saunders has said that he was "scared to write this book". He worried about his ability to portray Lincoln, but decided that limiting his characterization to a single night made the writing process "not easy, but easier, because I knew just where he was in his trajectory as president". Given that his work is generally set in the present, Saunders compared writing a novel set in 1862 to "running with leg weights" because he "couldn't necessarily do the voices that I would naturally create".

### Setting

Much of the novel takes place in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist "intermediate state" between death and reincarnation when the consciousness is not connected to a body. In Saunders's conception, the "ghosts" that inhabit the bardo are "disfigured by desires they failed to act upon while alive" and are threatened by permanent entrapment in the liminal space. They are unaware that they have died, referring to the space as their "hospital-yard" and to their coffins as "sick-boxes".
Saunders has said that, while he named the setting after Tibetan tradition, he incorporated elements of the Christian and Egyptian afterlives, so as not to be "too literal." The selection of the term "bardo", he said, was "partly to help the reader not to bring too many preconceptions to it... in a book about the afterlife, it's good to destabilize all of the existing beliefs as much as you can."

## Themes

* Unity: The spirits in the bardo, initially isolated by personal struggles, come together to help Willie transition, highlighting how shared experiences can foster connection.
* Transition and impermanence: The spirits' resistance to moving on mirrors Lincoln’s struggle to accept change in both his personal and political life.
* Loss: Lincoln's mourning for Willie serves as the novel’s emotional anchor, reflecting broader themes of memory and acceptance.
* Empathy and equality: The novel critiques social divisions by juxtaposing the spirits’ prejudices with Lincoln’s evolving empathy, particularly regarding race during the Civil War.
* Vice and virtue: The spirits struggle with moral complexity, revealing the contradictions of human nature.
* Love: The novel explores love as both a source of connection and an obstacle to letting go, as seen in Lincoln’s attachment to Willie.

### Honors and awards

In The New York Times, novelist Colson Whitehead called the book "a luminous feat of generosity and humanism". Time magazine listed it as one of its top ten novels of 2017, and Paste ranked it the fifth-best novel of the 2010s. In 2024, it was listed #18 on The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.
The novel has been compared with Edgar Lee Masters's poetry collection Spoon River Anthology, focused on the lives of people who have died, published in 1915. Tim Martin, writing for Literary Review, compared its "babble of American voices", some from primary sources and some expertly fabricated, with the last act of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town.
The novel won the 2017 Booker Prize.

## Adaptations
### Audiobook

The novel’s audiobook features 166 voice actors, including Nick Offerman, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Rainn Wilson, and Susan Sarandon.

### Film adaptation

Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman acquired film rights to the novel.

## Translations

The novel has been translated into Polish by Michał Kłobukowski and published by Znak in 2018. In Brazil, it was translated into Portuguese by Jorio Dauster and published by Companhia das Letras in 2018. In Iran, it was translated into Persian by Naeime Khalesi and published by Jomhooripub in 2018. It was translated into Greek by Giorgos-Ikaros Babasakis and published by Ikaros in 2017. A Swedish translation (by Niclas Nilsson) was published by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2018. A Croatian translation was released in 2018 by Vuković & Runjić, translated by Maja Šoljan.