Vincent Millay. Epstein was welcomed as a sympathetic and fair biographer, with an instinct for the fine detail and historical milieu; his biographies are considered in some cases definitive, but in all cases important contributions to American studies. Critics sometimes challenge the biographer's premises. Eric Foner, in The Washington Post, praised Lincoln and Whitman for its "revealing character study of Whitman and a penetrating analysis of his wartime poetry," but questioned the poet's influence on Lincoln's prose. All of these books were reviewed in the major media—the Nat King Cole biography on the cover of The New York Times Book Review section—and have remained in print through multiple editions. During this decade, as in the 1980s, Epstein contributed a number of book reviews to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. He also published translations of Plautus's Trinummus from the Latin, and Euripides' The Bacchae from the Greek. 2000–2010 Most of this period was devoted to the writing of a trilogy of books about Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and Whitman (2004), a dual biography of the poet and the president was praised by The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal for its "natural sense of detail and period" and its "passionate vividness." The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (2008) was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Sun Times and The Wall Street Journal, whose reviewer remarked it "may be the best Lincoln book in a generation." Epstein's short book on Lincoln's private secretaries, Lincoln's Men, was published the following year. 2011–present An amateur musician, the writer returned to the subject of music, and his life-long passion for folk music in particular, to write the biography of Bob Dylan on the occasion of the folk rock idol's seventieth birthday. Published in 2011 it was the first of Epstein's books to reach an extensive international audience, in editions published in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and other languages. For many years Epstein was researching and writing a book about Benjamin Franklin's relationship with his son William, the last royal governor of New Jersey. The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin's House (Ballantine/Random House) was finally published in 2018. The reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote that “The history of loyalist William Franklin and his famous father has been told before but not as fully or as well