How a Dying President Wrote America’s Most Honest Book

Ulysses S. Grant had known triumph before. He had led the Union Army to victory and carried the weight of a fractured country through its most fragile years. Yet the final stretch of his life unfolded in a quieter tragedy. In the years after his presidency, he invested his savings with a conman who promised prosperity but left him destitute. The loss might have been survivable if his health had held, but soon after, doctors quickly diagnosed him with throat cancer.

The man who had once commanded armies now measured his days in hours of strength, but even as his body failed, his resolve deepened. He would not die in disgrace or leave Julia, his wife of forty years, in poverty. Grant put pen to paper at a small table by the window of his brownstone in New York, jotting down memories of the war and of the men who had served under him. Initially, the effort was solely intended to provide a modest income, but it soon became his lifeline.

Mark Twain visited often, reading sections aloud and urging him forward. Determined to protect him from predatory publishers, Twain offered to handle the book himself, promising honest terms and the security that Grant could no longer support his family. While Grant never lived to see his work hit the shelves, it became one of the most widely read works in the country and provided stability to his family once he was gone.

Louis Picone traces this closing chapter of Grant’s life with precision and empathy, revealing how a man stripped of wealth, power, and health found in his own words the strength to leave something enduring behind.

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