Frank Crosby

Frank Crosby is a little-known 19th-century author associated most clearly with Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States, a biography first published in 1866. The book appeared very soon after Lincoln's assassination, which makes Crosby part of the earliest wave of writers trying to explain Lincoln's life, politics, and presidency to a broad readership.

Reliable biographical details about Crosby himself are hard to confirm from the sources available here. Open Library and Project Gutenberg both identify him as the author of the Lincoln biography, but they provide little personal background, so it is safest to focus on the work rather than the man.

For modern listeners, Crosby is interesting less as a famous literary figure than as a witness to his moment. His writing belongs to the immediate post-Civil War era, when Lincoln's legacy was still fresh and Americans were beginning to turn recent history into biography.