Outside, it's summer.

The weigela bushes outside the home of Richard Lawrence Miller sport purple blossoms. There's a front porch with a glider, which sways now in a mild breeze.

But Miller, greeting a visitor, doesn't linger here.

His mind is elsewhere -- back in the late winter of 1850. In Springfield, Ill.

Inside, in a first-floor office, Miller clicks on his Macintosh. Today, as he has done almost every day for the past eight years, Miller sits at a computer, summoning forth a distant, primitive world.

At his right hand are copies of pages from 19th-century Illinois newspapers. The Sangamo Journal. The Illinois State Register. The Peoria Register. The Quincy Whig. Also within easy reach: a magnifying glass, to help Miller discern the text printed on frontier presses some 160 years ago.

He's looking for any mention of his subject, an Illinois lawyer who at this moment in time is devastated. His 3-year-old son, Eddie, has just died of tuberculosis.

Miller glances to his left. Affixed there, on a small door to his computer cabinet, are maps of Illinois.

One depicts county boundaries in 1835. Still another notes railroad routes in 1858, the year his subject will participate in a famous series of debates.

But Miller is still back in 1850. He has a long way to go.

He is writing a four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. While that would seem to be challenge enough, there are further issues.

He describes himself as an independent scholar, meaning in part that he has no university affiliation. Because of that, some scholars may consider him to be trafficking in Abraham Lincoln scholarship without the appropriate bona fides.

There's another issue.

In 2007 doctors diagnosed Miller, 59, with Parkinson's disease. The affliction is not discernible to visitors. Yet Miller, while seated before the computer, does volunteer that he must be careful when navigating by mouse through his software that he does not involuntarily click on the wrong file.

So he's working with urgency.

To his right, a long shelf is lined with Lincoln reference works. Below them, discreetly displayed, is a series of small printed sentiments pulled from fortune cookies.

"You will always be successful in your professional career," reads one.

"Your dream of happiness will soon come true," reads another.

Miller hopes these prophecies prove accurate.

"I work in a pretty isolated environment," he says, smiling, "and sometimes I need the encouragement."

Abraham Lincoln is probably the country's most examined historical figure.

The most recent count of books written about the 16th president stands at about 14,000. Many of these books narrow their focus to a particular aspect of Lincoln's career: his writing, his oratory, his diet, his presidential Cabinet, his assassination.

Not Miller's.

His project will follow Lincoln from his 1809 birth in Kentucky to his winning, on the third ballot, the Republican Party nomination for president in 1860.

By assigning himself this task, Miller has placed himself in the select company of Lincoln biographers that include the president's former law partner William Herndon, his private secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell and Illinois poet and editor Carl Sandburg.

Today, meanwhile, bookstore shelves list from the weight of more recent Lincoln books written by James McPherson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Garry Wills, David Herbert Donald and many others.

This year is the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. Time magazine recently published an article speculating on what he would do about the economy.

A nation of extreme Lincoln fans sometimes exhibit their fascination by dressing up like him.

Still others sign up for corporate seminars where conveners divine management wisdom from their studies of Lincoln leadership qualities.

Meanwhile the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, in 2011, approaches.

Lincoln scholarship would seem to represent turf that is definitely plowed ground. Just about every American knows how Lincoln's story ends.

How could Miller, working at his computer in Kansas City, possibly dig up anything new?

But that, say several Lincoln scholars, is what Miller has done.

According to them, the first two volumes of Miller's four-volume project are full of revelations, especially in the way that Miller arranges heretofore scattered testimony that evokes a world often distant, heartbreaking and strange.

Readers of Miller's first volume, "Lincoln and His World: The Early Years, Birth to Illinois Legislature" learn how, in the late 1820s, Lincoln and friends, walking home on a freezing night, encountered a drunk, passed out and oblivious to the cold.

While Lincoln's friends thought the man should remain where he was to pay the price for his folly, Lincoln picked him up and carried him to a nearby fireplace.

Miller's second volume, "Lincoln and His World: Prairie Politician, 1834-1842," documents Lincoln's actions in local and state politics.

The excitement here, one Lincoln scholar says, is in reconciling the younger, ambitious Lincoln with the later Great Emancipator.

"Lincoln's start in politics was not always a very edifying spectacle," says Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. "There was a lot of primitive character assassination, a lot of dirty tricks. They played the race card shamelessly.

"Lincoln was a part of all that."

Miller's most newsworthy find so far probably is the "Lincoln suicide poem."

The poem was long thought lost. Miller's discovery, announced by him in an article in a Lincoln association newsletter, prompted further articles in The New Yorker and the Atlantic as well as on National Public Radio.

To hear Miller describe it, it was no eureka moment.

Some years earlier Miller was reviewing microfilm of the 1838 run of The Sangamo Journal, a newspaper distributed across Illinois. Miller happened upon an unsigned poem, 36 lines long, under the title "The Suicide's Soliloquy" and including graphic depictions of suicide by dagger.

"I thought, 'This is a poem about suicide,' " Miller says. " 'Lincoln wrote one of those.' "

He made a photocopy.

"Then I put it aside."

The moment of discovery came later, when he happened upon a comment by Joshua Speed, a longtime Lincoln associate who estimated that such a poem could have been written by Lincoln in 1838. Many scholars had previously thought that if any "suicide" poem existed, it probably would have appeared in the summer of 1841, when scholars agree that Lincoln suffered a second suicidal breakdown.

Miller dug out his photocopy.

The poem's rhyme and meter, he thought, bore the signature of Lincoln, a longtime fan of poetry who often composed his own verse.

"Plus, the treatment of suicide was right," Miller says. "Lincoln was never known for public confession of his feelings. This poem was more of a literary exercise."

Miller decided the poem was probably that of Lincoln, and he published his findings. While the discovery excited the community of Lincoln scholars, the bigger news to Miller was the validation of his research method.

This was proof that he could find the luminous nuggets in the low-grade ore.

"The poem had not been lost," Miller says. "It was there in plain sight. All these other researchers could have seen it. And maybe they did see it and didn't recognize it.

"But this was an illustration of a successful find, something which I have demonstrated time and time again on smaller levels.

"I knew I was going to be bringing forth new information."

In about 2001 Miller began to ask staff members at the Kansas City Public Library and the Johnson County Library to request microfilm reels from the Illinois State Historical Library. The library allowed a maximum of five reels of newspaper microfilm to be released at a time.

The five reels would arrive, and Miller would take a week or two to go through them.

"Then I would return those and say, 'OK, I need the next five.' "

There would be a 10-day turnaround before those reels arrived. Then Miller would begin the process again. And so on.

"It was like exploring," he says. "You scope out the general geography and then into the jungle you go, hacking your way along. I would do that for seven or eight hours a day.

"If you really get into it, you get into a sort of zone."

In 2003 Miller left Kansas City and spent several months in Springfield, visiting the manuscripts division of the Illinois State Historical Library, today known as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

He returned to Kansas City several months later and started writing. His first volume appeared in 2006. The 443-page book included more than 120 pages of index, bibliography and footnotes.

The second volume was published in 2008.

Although Miller has two bachelor's degrees -- from William Jewell College (in history) and Northwest Missouri State University (in radio and television) -- he has no graduate degree. He is not a faculty member at any institution.

To some, that suggests his work might be somehow lacking.

"I think that has influenced the way some look at Miller," says Wayne Temple, chief deputy director of the Illinois State Archives in Springfield.

"But it shouldn't," he adds. "They should just look at his work."

Another dimension of the independent scholar life: Miller doesn't employ graduate students to perform research or look at microfilm. Other researchers sometimes do, Miller says. But while that may increase productivity, it also removes the author from the source material.

Still another benefit, he says, is that he can compose his text using liberal amounts of archival information that he thinks is appropriate from the original source.

Miller, who already has published books on the Nazi legal system during the Holocaust, United States drug policy, and the early political career of Harry Truman, thinks the rules of history scholarship are too rigid. Often, he says, he has submitted book manuscripts to university presses, only to discover, following peer review, that the text allegedly lacked enough of his own voice.

"In other words, I wasn't telling people what they should think," Miller says.

"While I have an opinion of what was going on, what really matters is the material on which I base my opinions," he says. "I try to present as much of that material as possible so the reader can make up their own minds."

Readers of Miller's Lincoln books encounter long passages of recollections of Lincoln relatives, as well as miscellaneous writings from the period that Miller thinks are revealing and newspaper advertisements placed by the owners of slaves who had fled.

"He has gone through newspapers from all over Illinois and has picked out things that give you a feeling for the times that you don't find in other books," Temple says.

"He makes you feel what the period is like, and he is very accurate."

Before approaching Abraham Lincoln, Miller took on Harry Truman.

His 1986 book, "Truman: The Rise to Power," was similar to the Lincoln project in that it examined not the subject's time in the White House but the path taken there.

The book was important to Miller in several ways, he says. It sought evidence from often unexamined sources -- in Truman's case, the papers of his enemies as well as his friends.

Miller's late father, Jim Miller, was a sheriff's deputy in Clay County in the 1960s, a patronage employee. Richard Miller grew up with an intimate knowledge of county politics, and the Truman story had not been told from that perspective, he says.

Today he also wants to tell the Lincoln story from a different perspective.

"I just feel the Lincoln story hasn't been told," Miller says.

"One person has complained that, 'You don't see Lincoln's greatness in these books.' Well, no you don't, because nobody in the 1830s had any idea that Lincoln would become the pivotal figure in American history.

"If people don't see Lincoln's greatness, that means I have transported them to Lincoln's world."

Miller will concede that a sense of personal destiny drives his task.

While born in St. Louis, he lived in Chicago until he was 8 years old. On weekends his parents would take him to museums.

He has a specific memory of leaving one museum with two Lincoln souvenirs.

"One was a reproduction of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's handwriting," Miller says, "and the other was a portrait of Lincoln taken a few days before he delivered the address.

"Dad was driving the car.

"I can remember my mother and me sort of reverently opening the envelope and taking these things out to admire them. Later, all the way through elementary school, high school and college, both the photograph and the Gettysburg Address were in dime store frames, nailed into the wall over my bed in my family's home in Gladstone."

Today, with about 10 years left of Lincoln's Illinois political career to research, Miller is working with resolve.

"What I am trying to do is preserve the story," he says.

"This sounds apocalyptic, but I want to have a remaining record of what it was really like and what Lincoln was really doing, so people -- without going through all the records that I did -- will be able to see what really happened.

"I feel I am within the walls of a monastery and the barbarians are approaching and I am sealing manuscripts into clay jars and burying them in the courtyard."

His focus is of note even to his family.

"He goes about it with incredible devotion," says Miller's wife, Nancy Clark, a hand weaver who uses traditional floor looms to produce fashion accessories such as scarves and shawls.

"He thinks it, he breathes it, he embraces it. He has an ability to focus like no one else I have ever known. I have a pretty good self-discipline, but it doesn't compare to Richard's."

The Parkinson's diagnosis, Miller says, is a part of what is driving him.

"Physically it is getting harder to produce the work, just from making my fingers work properly," he says. "There is also a certain amount of fatigue setting in.

"Plus, who knows what else is going to go wrong? So I wake up every day, and I know I can't afford to tarry on this thing."

Miller hopes to deliver his third volume manuscript to his publisher this summer. After editing and revision, he expects publication next year.

If all goes as planned, the fourth and final volume will be published in 2012.

Meanwhile, his reputation is spreading among the Abe Nation. One admirer, addressing Miller through his MySpace page, recently forwarded him a question.

What, he asked, did Lincoln smell like?

For once, Miller did not consult the microfilm.

"In my reply," Miller says, "I said that I simply assumed he just smelled like everybody else."