Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete

Ulysses S. Grant wrote these memoirs while dying of throat cancer, dictating them in agonizing sessions to ensure his family would be provided for after he lost everything to a Ponzi scheme. The result is something far greater than a soldier's autobiography: a masterpiece of clarity and restraint that Mark Twain published and literary giants from Gertrude Stein to Henry James hailed as among the greatest American prose. Grant's account of the Civil War:the campaigns, the decisions, the blood:remains the definitive voice from inside that conflict, written by the man who more than anyone else understood how to break the Confederate Army. Yet the memoirs also trace an earlier life: a mediocre West Point cadet, a failed businessman, a man who seemed destined for obscurity until history demanded he become indispensable. There is no self-pity here, no heroics, only a steady accounting of what happened and why. This is the book Abraham Lincoln never wrote, and it belongs on the same shelf.