By Tom Carrozza
Over the past five years, Oceanside native Paul Dunn dedicated himself to getting inside the mind of Abraham Lincoln and presenting historical fiction from the perspective of the legendary president.
The last book of his four-volume series “The Civil War diaries of Abraham Lincoln—including his Recurring dreams” became available for purchase on Amazon.com and Kindle in November 2020.
In 1946, Dunn joined the U.S. Navy two weeks after graduating from Oceanside High School.
“We joined up not for patriotism, but for the G.I. Bill,” Dunn said. The bill afforded him an opportunity to pursue higher education at St. John’s University, where he attended law school from 1948 to 1954 after two years of service. Dunn went to school in Brooklyn at nights while working as the advertising manager for Radio City Music Hall for a time.
Dunn started his writing when he returned from the Navy and published and edited a small newspaper in Oceanside called Around Town. The bi-weekly paper covered Oceanside news from 1950 to 1952. In his two years there, Dunn’s paper experienced a wide spread of circulation and was printed out of what used to be a prohibition-era counterfeit labeling print shop.
Wherever Dunn has been, he has always been able to use his writing talent. For the past 20 years, Dunn has been working as a columnist for a publication called The Pilot in Pinehurst, N.C., where he still lives. It was there where Dunn wrote his first political book called “Touching raw nerves: A liberal Yankee columnist takes on conservative Dixie” in 2004.
“The title indicated that I was a northerner down here who liked to write political stuff that might annoy the natives,” Dunn said. His experiences writing in North Carolina ignited a curiosity in the Civil War and got him to start researching Lincoln who he called one of his favorite American political figures.
Aware of the abundance of media covering Lincoln’s life, Dunn knew he would have to think outside the box to provide an interesting perspective on Honest Abe. He contacted the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. and found that Lincoln had never left behind a diary.
This led Dunn to seek out a book called “Abraham Lincoln day-by-day chronology (1809-1865),” which was a government-sponsored record that listed where the president was and who he met with over the course of his life. Dunn used the chronology and a nine-volume set of Lincoln’s writings in letters and telegrams to get inside the mind of his favorite historical figure.
“So, I thought, ‘I’ve got all the information here. It just takes some imagination,’ “Dunn said.
So, he got to work writing every night before he went to bed what Lincoln would have thought after things like battles and meetings since he had such a detailed record of Lincoln’s schedule. Dunn spent six years researching and gathering letters and telegrams from Lincoln before publishing his first volume of the series in August 2017.
Dunn’s work is immersed in historical accounts because of the amount of information he had gathered from records, letters, and first-hand accounts of Lincoln’s life. The four volumes are based on fictional diary entries after years of research by Dunn that enabled him to create such a vivid illustration of what might have been going through Lincoln’s mind as he sent troops to war and tried to repair a broken nation.
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March 25, 2021 at 09:46PM
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Oceanside native publishes fictional Abe Lincoln diary series - liherald.com
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