How a grieving president and a Tibetan concept birthed a literary masterpiece
In short: George Saunders spent twenty years haunted by a single image: Abraham Lincoln cradling his dead son in a Georgetown crypt. This vision eventually evolved into his 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a surreal exploration of grief set in the intermediate space between life and death.
The novel’s genesis lies in a historical anecdote that Saunders heard from his wife’s cousin. In 1862, after his young son Willie died, a devastated Lincoln reportedly visited the boy’s crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery on multiple occasions to hold his body. This image, which Saunders mentally linked to the Pietà, remained with him for two decades. He finally began writing in 2012, driven by a desire to avoid the regret of leaving his most ambitious artistic project unattempted.
Saunders chose the Tibetan Buddhist term 'bardo'—the state between death and reincarnation—as the setting for the story. In his interpretation, the bardo is a liminal space inhabited by ghosts who are unaware of their own deaths, referring to their coffins as 'sick-boxes'. While the setting draws on Tibetan tradition, Saunders intentionally blended in Christian and Egyptian afterlife elements to destabilize reader preconceptions. He found that restricting the narrative to a single night helped him manage the daunting task of portraying a historical figure as iconic as Lincoln.
To construct the novel's unique voice, Saunders conducted extensive research, including consulting Edmund Wilson’s 1962 study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore. He wove together authentic historical excerpts with expertly fabricated accounts, creating a 'babble of American voices' that critics have compared to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. The result is a work that has achieved significant cultural longevity, recently named the 18th-best book of the 21st century by The New York Times.
The book’s impact has extended far beyond the page. Its audiobook version features a massive cast of 166 narrators, including celebrities like Nick Offerman, Don Cheadle, and Susan Sarandon. The story has also inspired a short film, an upcoming feature film produced by Tom Hanks, and an opera commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, set to debut in 2026. Through these various mediums, Saunders’s exploration of a president’s private sorrow continues to resonate globally.
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