Doug Wilson and Rod Davis, co-directors of the center and retired Knox College history professors, have compiled a new edition of "Herndon's Lincoln," which will be released this fall as the first book in the Knox College Lincoln Studies Center Series, published by the University of Illinois Press.

"Right now we have plans for five books in the series," Davis said.

Future books in the series include two edited by other Lincoln scholars and two edited by Wilson and Davis, who are working on the first critical edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

"We hope to have that out by late summer 2008, in time for the sesquicentennial of the Lincoln-Douglas debates," said Davis. Old Main on the Knox College campus is the only remaining building from the debates, which took place during the Senate campaign in1858.

The Lincoln Studies Center will mark the launch of the series with a celebration at 4 p.m. Friday in the Lincoln Room in Seymour Union at Knox College.

The speakers will include Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press; Roger Taylor, president of Knox College; Lawrence Breitborde, vice president for academic affairs and dean of Knox College; and Julie Cellini, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

The featured speaker will be Jennifer Fleischner, professor of English at Adelphi University and a member of the center's board of advisers. She will give a talk based on her book, "Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave."

"Herndon's Lincoln," which first appeared in 1889, was William Herndon's attempt to create a portrait of his law partner and friend, Abraham Lincoln, that showed Lincoln to be a man, not a saint.

Collaborating with Jesse Weik, Herndon produced a biography that was controversial from the start but is considered one of the most influential biographies of Lincoln ever published.

"Herndon was more interested in writing essays and interpretations of Lincoln's life, and he wasn't up to the task of writing a historical narrative," Davis said. "Weik understood that the public wanted a full narrative of Lincoln's life before going to Washington, and that's what Weik was able to write.

"One of the things that Doug and I have discovered is the extent to which Weik was a very significant collaborator. Herndon gathered the material, but essentially Weik wrote the book."

In the new edition, Wilson and Davis have restored the original text and included the story of how the biography came to be. The book also includes two chapters that were added to the revised edition published in 1882.

"Since its original publication in 1889, 'Herndon's Lincoln' has been the most widely circulated Lincoln biography and has been especially influential in the views that we have of Lincoln's pre-presidential years," Davis said.

Herndon became Lincoln's law partner in Springfield in 1844. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Herndon collected extensive reminiscences from people who had known Lincoln, material that Wilson and Davis co-edited in the book "Herndon's Informants."