When he began to write, he had begun to suffer the agonising pain of throat cancer. Grant’s memoirs are all the more remarkable for having been completed under duress. The reader finds himself on edge to know how the civil war is coming out.” has conveyed the suspense which was felt by himself and his army and by all who believed in the Union cause. Indeed, Grant’s life story is both remarkable and moving.įor the critic Edmund Wilson, who put Grant in the exalted literary company of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, this powerful autobiography is “a unique expression of the national character. Although Grant was on the winning side, he was always brutally honest about both his successes and failures, and never failed to acknowledge the grinding poverty from which the civil war rescued him. The unputdownable heart of Grant’s book is his eyewitness account of the vicissitudes of the American civil war: the outbreak of hostilities the battle of Shiloh the campaign against Vicksburg the battle of Chattanooga Sherman’s March Lincoln’s assassination and Lee’s surrender. His narrative has the simple directness of the finest English prose: the overall effect is both intimate and majestic
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