Lincoln in the Bardo

Based on Wikipedia: Lincoln in the Bardo

A President Holding His Dead Son's Body

Picture Abraham Lincoln in the dead of night, slipping away from the White House during the darkest days of the Civil War. He walks to a small cemetery crypt on a Georgetown hill. Inside lies the body of his eleven-year-old son Willie, dead from typhoid fever. And according to newspaper accounts from 1862, Lincoln opened the coffin and held the boy's corpse in his arms.

Not once. Several times.

This haunting image—the most powerful man in America cradling his dead child like a reverse Pietà—lodged itself in the mind of writer George Saunders for more than twenty years. He was too terrified to write about it. What if he couldn't do justice to Lincoln's grief? What if the weight of American history crushed the story he wanted to tell?

Then, around 2012, Saunders did the math. He wasn't getting any younger. Did he really want his own gravestone to read "Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt"? So he finally sat down and wrote the book. The result, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the 2017 Booker Prize and was later named one of the best novels of the decade by multiple publications.

What Exactly Is a Bardo?

The novel's title contains a word most readers have never encountered. "Bardo" comes from Tibetan Buddhism, where it refers to an intermediate state—a kind of waiting room between death and whatever comes next. The consciousness floats, unmoored, no longer attached to a physical body but not yet reborn into a new one.

Think of it as spiritual limbo, though that's a Christian concept and Saunders deliberately wanted to avoid any single religious framework. He borrowed the Tibetan term precisely because most Western readers wouldn't bring too many preconceptions to it. Then he mixed in elements from Christian ideas about the afterlife and ancient Egyptian beliefs about the journey after death. The result is something genuinely new—a space that feels both ancient and strangely modern.

In Saunders's version of the bardo, the ghosts don't know they're dead. They believe they're merely sick, waiting to recover. They call the graveyard a "hospital-yard" and refer to their coffins as "sick-boxes." This self-deception has consequences. The ghosts become physically disfigured by the desires they failed to pursue while alive, twisted into grotesque shapes by regret and longing. And if they linger too long in this in-between place, they risk becoming trapped there forever.

A Novel That Sounds Like Nothing Else

What makes Lincoln in the Bardo so unusual isn't just its subject matter. It's the way Saunders constructed the thing.

The bulk of the story unfolds over a single night in the cemetery. Willie Lincoln has just been interred. His ghost, confused and frightened, finds himself surrounded by other spirits—a whole community of the dead who have been lingering in the bardo for years or even decades. Meanwhile, in the world of the living, President Lincoln arrives to visit his son's crypt, setting in motion a strange collision between grief, history, and the supernatural.

Saunders tells this story through a chorus of 166 different voices. Some belong to the ghosts, each with their own personality, their own unfinished business, their own reason for refusing to move on. Others are drawn directly from historical sources—newspaper accounts, letters, memoirs—that Saunders researched extensively. He consulted dozens of books about Lincoln and the Civil War era, including Edmund Wilson's celebrated 1962 study Patriotic Gore.

Here's the twist: Saunders also invented some of his historical sources. He fabricated fake excerpts, complete with fictional citations, and wove them seamlessly alongside the real ones. The effect is disorienting in the best way. You can't always tell what's documented history and what's Saunders's imagination. The boundary between fact and fiction becomes as blurry as the boundary between life and death in the bardo itself.

Critics have compared this technique to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, a poetry collection from 1915 where dead townspeople speak from their graves, each voice revealing secrets and regrets. Others hear echoes of the final act of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, with its wistful ghosts looking back on the lives they've left behind.

The Statue That Kept Him Going

Writing a historical novel terrified Saunders. His previous work—short stories, mostly—had been set firmly in the present day, often in slightly surreal versions of contemporary America. Suddenly he had to inhabit 1862. He compared the experience to "running with leg weights." He couldn't rely on his natural instinct for voice and dialogue. Everything had to be filtered through a different era's way of speaking and thinking.

What kept him going was a statue.

Outside Saunders's office at Syracuse University, where he teaches creative writing, stands a sculpture called Lincoln the Mystic. It was created by James Earle Fraser, the same artist who designed the Buffalo nickel. The statue depicts Lincoln in a pose of deep melancholy, his face carrying the weight of all the death and destruction of the war he was fighting.

Saunders would look at that statue and find the courage to continue. By limiting his portrayal of Lincoln to a single night—not trying to capture the whole man, just this one moment of private grief—he made the impossible seem merely difficult. "Not easy," he said, "but easier, because I knew just where he was in his trajectory as president."

An Audiobook Unlike Any Other

Saunders usually records his own audiobooks. For his short story collections, he'd simply sit in a studio and read every word himself. But Lincoln in the Bardo has 166 characters. Even Saunders's considerable talents couldn't stretch that far.

So he assembled a cast.

His friend Nick Offerman—the actor best known for playing the hyper-masculine Ron Swanson on the television comedy Parks and Recreation—signed on early. So did Offerman's wife, Megan Mullally, famous for her role as the outrageously wealthy Karen Walker on Will and Grace. The two of them started recruiting their famous friends.

The final cast reads like the guest list at an exceptionally literary Hollywood party. Julianne Moore. Don Cheadle. Susan Sarandon. Ben Stiller. Lena Dunham. Bill Hader. Keegan-Michael Key. David Sedaris. Jeff Tweedy from the band Wilco. Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia. Miranda July. Rainn Wilson. The list goes on.

Mixed in among the celebrities are Saunders's wife, his children, and various friends from his non-famous life. The result is an audiobook that feels genuinely collaborative—a piece of vocal ensemble work where each ghost gets their own distinct human voice.

From Page to Stage and Screen

The novel's theatrical quality didn't go unnoticed by people who actually make theater for a living.

Mullally and Offerman were so taken with the book that they purchased the film rights just five weeks after publication. As of this writing, the movie hasn't been made yet, but the rights are secured. Given Hollywood's tendency to let literary properties languish in what the industry calls "development hell," there's no guarantee it will ever reach the screen. But the ambition is there.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned an operatic adaptation. The composer is Missy Mazzoli, known for her critically acclaimed operas Breaking the Waves and Proving Up. The librettist is Royce Vavrek, her frequent collaborator. The premiere is scheduled for October 2026.

Opera might actually be the perfect medium for this material. The form already embraces heightened emotion, supernatural elements, and multiple voices weaving together in complex harmony. The ghosts of the bardo, with their twisted bodies and unfinished longings, seem ready-made for operatic treatment.

Critical Acclaim and Literary Legacy

When Lincoln in the Bardo arrived in bookstores in February 2017, the reviews were rapturous.

Colson Whitehead, himself a major American novelist (his The Underground Railroad had won the National Book Award just months earlier), called Saunders's book "a luminous feat of generosity and humanism" in The New York Times. Time magazine named it one of the top ten novels of 2017. Paste magazine ranked it the fifth-best novel of the entire 2010s decade. And in 2024, The New York Times conducted an ambitious survey to determine the best books of the twenty-first century so far. Lincoln in the Bardo came in at number eighteen.

The Booker Prize—Britain's most prestigious literary award, which expanded in 2014 to include American authors—went to Saunders in October 2017. For a writer who had built his reputation on short stories, who had actively avoided writing novels for most of his career, it was a remarkable validation.

The book became a bestseller on both The New York Times and USA Today lists. It has since been translated into Polish, Portuguese, Persian, Greek, Swedish, and Croatian, among other languages. Abraham Lincoln's grief, filtered through Saunders's experimental form, has traveled around the world.

Why This Story, Why Now?

There's something fitting about this novel appearing when it did. In 2017, America was as divided as it had been in generations. Lincoln, the president who held the country together through its most catastrophic rupture, had become an almost mythic figure—invoked by politicians of every stripe, claimed as an ancestor by anyone who needed moral authority.

Saunders's novel doesn't engage with Lincoln the politician or Lincoln the Great Emancipator. It shows us Lincoln the father, broken by loss, sneaking away from his duties to hold his dead child's body. It humanizes the monument. It reminds us that even the people we carve into mountains were once flesh and blood, capable of grief so profound it drove them to desperate acts.

The bardo, in Saunders's telling, is a place where people get stuck because they can't let go. They cling to their old desires, their old resentments, their old selves. They refuse to accept that things have changed irrevocably. The only way out is to finally release your grip on what you've lost.

Lincoln, visiting his son's crypt, is doing the opposite. He's clinging. He's refusing to let go. And yet somehow, in that refusal, in that desperate midnight embrace of a corpse, there's something deeply human. Something we recognize in ourselves.

George Saunders carried this image for twenty years because he was afraid of it. Then he wrote the book because he was more afraid of dying without trying. The ghosts in his novel are trapped by the things they didn't do. Saunders decided not to join them.