“You are certainly right in one thing,” he begins: Grant’s fame was timeless – and would last in the way of great cities which, good times or bad, were essentially indestructible. Twain, writing on August 11th, just three days after 60,000 worthies and every stripe of official and soldier, high and low, escorted Grant’s body through Manhattan as he, and a 1,000,000 others watched, was sure of one thing. These two Twain letters, tell that story… And two months after that, Mark Twain handed Grant’s widow, Julia, what was then the largest royalty ever seen: $200,000. Grant came out, it was hailed a masterpiece. When, in December, the Personal Memoirs of U.S. And so Grant, making the bravest fight of his life – against cancer, destitution, pain – wrote every day until, literally speechless, he finished on July 20th. His friend Mark Twain, advising him on contracts, convinced him finally to sign one with him, on February 27, 1885. That summer, he went to work – writing, writing, writing, his wife recalled, for their bread. On May 6th, then, the ex-Lieutenant General and General-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States ex-4 star General of the Army of the United States and ex-two time President of the United States, had exactly $80 in his pocket and the $130 his wife pulled from a cookie jar. A month earlier, his reputation went up in flames when a New York swindler to whom he had lent his illustrious name, made off with $16 million dollars – of which $750,000, was Grant’s. But it wasn’t just his throat that was on fire. Rinsing with water made it even worse – it felt, he said, like swallowing molten lead. Grant bit into a peach, he felt a sudden sharp pain – as if a shard from its pit had lodged in his throat. He smoked 20 a day for 20 years and that, and a peach, brought him down.
Three quarters of a million men died in the war that made him famous, but when all was over, it was the cigars that killed him. and America’s greatest 19th century general, came together to produce a book which has never gone out of print, is told here… Grant made his widow a very, very rich woman. And when it sprang up, five months later, in the form of 610,000 single volumes costing an average of $4 each, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. But when, on July 20, 1885, Grant placed his pencil atop a bureau in the room in which he worked and slept, what he put to bed as it were, was a two-volume 1,215 page masterpiece. Twain, a friend and admirer, offered generous terms to publish it. Grant had done it for the money a swindle had left him destitute. Grant finishing, three days before his agonizing death from throat cancer, the autobiography he had spent the last year of his life writing. “One day he put aside his pencil and said there was nothing more to do.” That is how Mark Twain described Ulysses S.
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