Grant’s penetrating and stately work reveals a nobility of spirit and an innate grasp of the important fact, which he rarely displayed in private life. Publication of the memoirs came at a time when the public was being treated to a spate of wartime reminiscences, many of them defensive in nature, seeking to refight battles or attack old enemies. He vowed he would finish the work before he died, and one week after its completion, he lay dead at the age of 63. Driven by financial worries and a desire to provide for his wife, he wrote diligently during a year of deteriorating health. Grant was sick and broke when he began work on his memoirs. Written under excruciating circumstances-Grant was dying of throat cancer-and encouraged and edited from its very inception by Mark Twain, it is a triumph of the art of autobiography. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage as he reflects on the fortunes that shaped his life and his character. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. “Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else… Ulysses Grant in his Memoirs gives us a unique glimpse of someone who found that the habit of reflection could serve as a force multiplier for leadership.Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. “Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War.” “What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity… Grant’s style is strikingly modern in its economy.” Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America’s democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order.
Grant Association’s Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S.
This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant’s memoirs, clarifying the great military leader’s thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. Mark Twain and Henry James hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents credit Grant with influencing their own writing. Grant’s memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible.
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