Richard N. Current

I was born on Lincoln Avenue (in Colorado City, which was later annexed to Colorado Springs) and, while in high school, was once called upon to recite the Gettysburg Address, but never became seriously interested in Abraham Lincoln until 1953, when I was forty years old and teaching at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Recently retired from the university, J. G. Randall, the foremost Lincoln authority, died that year with the fourth and final volume of his magisterial Lincoln the President unfinished. He left a note asking me to complete it for him, which I did, and thus became a convert to Lincoln scholarship.