Article compares John Lennon with Lincoln
NOV. 18, 2005--An unusual article called "Lincoln and Lennon: The President and the Poet" pays tribute to John Lennon today within two weeks of the 25th anniversary of his murder on Dec. 8, 1980.
Written by Beatles author Jim O'Donnell, the piece appears at
www.lincolnandlennon.com. The article draws several stunning parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon, ranging from the political to the social to the personal.
"Both Lennon and Lincoln have always fascinated me," said O'Donnell. "The details in the piece come from reading I've done over the years. I'm sure a lot of people have never thought of John Lennon and Abraham Lincoln in the same light.
"But when you read the article," he continued, "you see that there were many connections between the two of them and they're deep-seeded connections. In the very least, I suppose, the piece makes a solid argument for handgun control."
O'Donnell's Beatles book, The Day John Met Paul, was published by Penguin in 1996. It details the events of July 6, 1957, when Lennon and McCartney first met.
Oddly enough, that book came by way of a book on the day Lennon died, Dec. 8, 1980. O'Donnell started the as-yet-unpublished Lennon's Last Day in 1982, but stopped four years later.
"I couldn't take it emotionally," said O'Donnell. "But I had noticed in my research that there were very few details in books and articles about the meeting of John and Paul.
"So I did a 180-degree turn in 1986 and wrote about a birth, instead of a death. It took me eight years to finish The Day John Met Paul. I'm a fast writer," he laughs, "but a slow researcher."
He returned to work on Lennon's Last Day in 1999.
"Now I'm in the home stretch, thankfully," said O'Donnell. "It has been a long haul--'82 to '86 is four years. Then '99 to 2005 is six years. That's 10 years and I'm still on it.
"What happened is that the writing slowed down because it became so difficult to do. I started out writing about the assassination of a legend and I'm ending up writing about the murder of a man--a dad, a husband, a guy coming home from work.
"Once Lennon became less of a legend to me, the writing and researching of this book became much harder to do. It has become a story of how a couple of boys lost their dad and a woman lost her husband. It doesn't matter whether your last name is Lincoln or Lennon or Smith--that's a hard story to live."
