Stephen B. Oates, a Civil War historian and the biographer of several prominent Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and William Faulkner, died on Aug. 20 at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 85.
His son, Greg, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
In his best-known works, Dr. Oates explored the lives of four prominent figures — John Brown, Nat Turner, Lincoln and Dr. King — in what he called his “Civil War quartet.”
These men, he wrote in “Biography as High Adventure,” an essay published in 1986, “humanize the monstrous moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.”
