'Abraham Lincoln: A History (Volume 4)' Summary

Sale of the serialization rights to The Century magazine, edited by Hay's friend Richard Watson Gilder, helped give Hay and Nicolay the impetus to bring what had become a massive project to a whole. Gilder, for his part, tried to keep the perspective from becoming too partisan in favor of the North, as The Century was a national magazine with a diverse readership.

The published work, Abraham Lincoln: A History, has an alternation of parts in which Lincoln is at center, and discussions of contextual matters such as legislative events or battles. The first serial installment, published in November 1886, received positive reviews, though some, including Herndon, considered the contextual sections dull. Life magazine proposed a party game, to locate five references to Lincoln in a given installment, assuming there were any to be found. When the ten-volume set emerged in 1890, it was not sold in bookstores, but instead door-to-door, the practice followed then by noted authors like Twain. Despite a price of $50, and the fact that a good part of the work had been serialized, five thousand copies were quickly sold.