Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant are two volumes of autobiography by Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States. The work focuses on his military career during the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War. The volumes were written during the last year of Grant's life, amid increasing pain from terminal throat cancer and against the backdrop of his personal bankruptcy at the hands of an early Ponzi scheme. The set was published by Mark Twain shortly after Grant's death in July 1885. Twain was a close personal friend of Grant and used all of his famous talent for promotion in selling the books. Understanding that sales of the book would restore the Grant family's finances and provide for his widow, Twain created a unique marketing system designed to reach millions of veterans with a patriotic appeal just as the famous general's death was being mourned. Ten thousand agents canvassed the North for orders, following a script that Twain had devised. Many were Union veterans dressed in their old uniforms, who went door-to-door offering the two-volume set at prices ranging from $3.50 to $12, depending on the binding ($ to $ in ). These efforts sold 350,000 two-volume sets in advance of the book's actual printing. This made the Memoirs one of the bestselling books of the 19th century, in its first year outselling even the publishing behemoth Uncle Tom's Cabin—an extremely unusual result for a non-fiction book. By way of comparison, the memoirs of Grant's colleague William Tecumseh Sherman, published in 1876, were an immense financial success for their author, selling 25,000 copies during its first decade in print. In the end Grant's widow, Julia, received about $450,000 ($ in ) from Twain during the first three years of publication, suggesting that Grant received around 30% of each sale (i.e., a 30% royalty rate). Despite being explicitly written for money, and with a focus on those aspects of Grant's life most likely to induce sales, the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant received universal acclaim on its publication and has remained highly regarded by the general public, military historians, and literary critics. The combination of an honest man exploited and then marked for death by throat cancer lent the Memoirs immense contemporary interest. Positive attention is often directed toward Grant's prose, which has been praised as lean, intelligent and effective.