David Donald, historian of Lincoln, dies

BOSTON, May 19 (UPI) -- David Herbert Donald, a Harvard professor emeritus who won two Pulitzer Prizes for biography, has died in Boston at 88.

Donald died Sunday, the Boston Globe reported.

A native of Mississippi and graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson, Donald came north to Illinois for graduate school. He specialized in the history of the United States during the Civil War and the period immediately before and after and in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Donald's first book was on Lincoln's law partner and at his death he was working on a study of John Quincy Adams' years as an abolitionist congressman.

In 1960, Donald won a Pulitzer for "Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War." His second book, 27 years later, was for "Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe," a biography of the North Carolina novelist.

Donald received many other honors for his work. In 2005, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill., awarded him the first David Herbert Donald Prize for excellence in Lincoln studies.

Appropriately, Donald lived on Lincoln Road in Lincoln, Mass., and is to be buried in Lincoln Cemetery. He told interviewers he picked the town for its excellent school system, not its name.