HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. I don't come there to contravene their education. Twain’s terms were generous, according to Grant biographer Charles Bracelen Flood, who writes in his book Grant’s Final Victory that “Grant was to receive an immediate advance of $10,000” and “a 20 percent gross royalty on the sales.” Twain’s offer saved Grant financially, and Grant’s delivery of his finished Memoirs, just days before throat cancer took his life at age 63, would ensure his family’s financial future. The hero of war had no way of knowing his final determined act would also make him a literary hero. “There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.”. He knew the end was near. The armies had been confronting each other so long, without any decisive result, that they hardly knew which could whip.” As Grant realized, the next year saw desperate fighting, high casualties, but eventual victory for the Union troops. Founded in 1887, The Writer instructs, informs, and inspires writers, providing practical coverage of the craft of writing and of the publishing industry. Completely baseless. It occurred to me at once that [Confederate Missouri State Guard Brig. As he showed all his life, but especially at the end, Grant never stopped fighting. You can get various degrees in writing. According to Flood, Grant wrote about six or seven hours a day. He became an author in the final year of his life, right after he’d suffered two massive blows that would have destroyed a lesser man. On the contrary, I try to reinforce the ethic of hard work. After all, the memoirs emphasize Grant’s perspective. (Library of Congress), Grant also realized the appeal of Abraham Lincoln, the tragedy of his death, and the coming to power of Andrew Johnson. But a degree can't make you a writer in the way that JD can make you a lawyer. He believed strongly that the only way to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia was to destroy it, to attack all Confederate forces on all fronts at the same time, and to wear away their fighting strength. I could go on, but you get the gist. The Victor: Ulysses S. Grant poses for an image after his promotion to Union Army commander. Grant wrote: “[T]he results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance….I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.”, Despite the hard war that he believed in, Grant made clear in his memoirs that he had a softer side, too. It wasn't abstraction that gave him this: It did seem to me, in my early army days, that too many of the older officers, when they came to command posts, made it a study to think what orders they could publish to annoy their subordinates and render them uncomfortable. Most of the war’s veterans were about 40 years old, and their wives and families were similarly young. In the end, Ward fled with everyone’s money, including Grant’s. It was to that end that I, ably assisted by David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo, began work on an annotated version of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Miranda Lambert, country singer ("Kerosene," "Famous in a Small Town"). When I visit schools around the country I consistently repeat this -- not because I think school is worthless, but because, very often, there are kids in the audience who are lost, just as I once was. In fact, he felt, as they did, the fear of combat. “Mr. He used Grant’s famous name to attract investors, but he was actually operating a massive Ponzi scheme, paying out interest but keeping investors’ money himself. Grant wrote the memoir in part because he had lost all his money in a financial scandal and hoped the sales of the book would provide income for his wife, Julia, and their children. We had to have hard fighting to achieve this. The determination he conveyed during the Civil War was evident during an instance when he described having to swim a swollen creek on horseback to be sure he proposed to his fiancée, Julia Dent, before he left for the Mexican War. If someone else had been colonel and I had been lieutenant-colonel I do not think I would have felt any trepidation…”, After a night of sleep, Grant still did not feel better. The result of his death-defying determination was the creation of one of the greatest pieces of nonfiction in all of American literature, a memoir that dozens of historians have used as a source to produce studies of the war, and that uncounted people have read for personal enrichment. You can see how the article changed after that, and how much better the next one was, and about that time he was diagnosed with cancer and decided to turn the whole thing into a memoir, forgoing the last two articles. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images). When his father decided that he wanted to send him to West Point in 1839 so that Grant could receive a free education, the 17-year-old rebelled. It was his lived experience. Cary Grant has been memorialized as one of the greats, a man whose rugged good looks and effortless charm drove audiences wild. Keep up with current events in the writing world. Sinbad (David Adkins), comedian, actor (Necessary Roughness, Houseguest). He marched his men toward the enemy and “my heart kept getting higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. Show that green-eyed monster to the door. The sick, aging warrior put down his pen. August 1861 image. His marvelous Personal Memoirs is a literary testament to his monumental toughness. “It seemed to Twain, sitting quietly near him in his bedroom at Sixtieth Street, that Grant had fully regained the stature of a hero” (Kaplan, 273). In terrible pain from throat cancer, hour after hour and day after day he had pushed himself to write his recollections from his cottage atop New York’s Mount McGregor. When it came to the Civil War, once again he saw slavery’s dire role: “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.” Despite believing that slavery, which he disliked, was the cause of the war, he was initially not ready to become part of the military to end it. (And a God-given wit, no doubt.) You may know that the Memoirs originated in four articles Grant agreed to write for the Century Magazine, which ran a series on civil war battles told by the generals involved. Become a member and get exclusive access to articles, contests and more! I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”, In the field: Grant studies a map at his headquarters near Cold Harbor, Va., in 1864. The inspiring story of why and how Grant wrote his memoirs, published in 1885, is as epic as his tumultuous life. “My sensations as we approached what I supposed might be ‘a field of battle’ were anything but agreeable. His father stood firm, Grant recalled. And, as Grant indicated in his memoirs, it is also important to remember that command is not an easy task. Of course Grant came up.) As he confided to a friend: “I pray God however that [my life] may be spared to complete the necessary work upon my book.” Grant won the race, but just barely. It was July 18, 1885, and Ulysses S. Grant had just finished his memoirs. Broke and battling cancer, he chose to write his life story to guarantee his family’s future. Struggling to dictate his notes to a stenographer, Grant finished his memoirs shortly before his death in the summer of 1885. He thought he’d become rich as a partner in Grant and Ward, a New York investment bank founded by his friend Ferdinand Ward. Therefore, a modern version, edited to explain the details, was absolutely essential if this classic was to remain understandable to a wide audience. This note means a lot to me because I think the assumption that drunken failure (as he is often depicted in history) like Grant has implications beyond the White House. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images). She had a lazy eye, often posed for images in profile to hide it, and recalled that as a child she “used to cry” about her looks.

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