President ulysses s grant autobiography
•
Grant's Last Battle: The Story Behind the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Buy the Kindle eBook
About the Book
The former general in chief of the Union armies during the Civil War . . . the two-term president of the United States . . . the beloved ambassador of American goodwill around the globe . . . the respected New York financier—Ulysses S. Grant—was dying. The hardscrabble man who regularly smoked 20 cigars a day had developed terminal throat cancer. Thus began Grant’s final battle—a race against his own failing health to complete his anställda Memoirs in an attempt to secure his family’s financial säkerhet. But the project evolved into something far more: an effort to secure the very meaning of the Civil War itself and how it would be remembered.
The news of Grant’s illness came swift on the heels of his financial ruin. Investors lost millions. The public ire that turned on Grant first suspected malfeasance, then incompetence,
•
Grant, Ulysses S, John F. Marszalek, David S. Nolen, and Louie P. Gallo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. With a preface by Frank J. Williams.
President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) was one of the most esteemed individuals of the nineteenth century. His two-volume memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, have never gone out of print and were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed these works as great literature, and presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both credit Grant with influencing their own writing. Yet a judiciously annotated clarifying edition of these memoirs has never been produced until now. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant’s memoirs, fully representing the great military leader’s thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War an
•
Personal Memoirs
Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885) define understatement but not modesty. Grant shows rather than tells what a badass he is. In recounting the war, Grant rarely quotes himself or relates his conversation but to a drop some tough guy quip or poised martial-arts musing. That kind of thing may have sounded self-effacing in times given to martial speechifying and self-praise in the third person, but nowadays we expect the Hero to be a man of few but compelling words (Hemingway learned his craft under Gertrude Stein, who as a Grant-venerator once planned to co-write the general’s biography with Sherwood Anderson). Here’s Grant shooting the breeze with the third-in-comm