Grant and Twain

I've been fascinated by Ulysses Grant for a long time. I can spend a long time looking at those photographs of him during the Civil War, trying to figure out what he was thinking about. I feel like I know him -- that he could be my brother. It doesn't make any sense.

So I was delighted to find a book called "Grant and Twain" by Mark Perry, which tells the story of the unlikely friendship between Grant and Mark Twain. It was Twain who convinced Grant to write his memoirs and to work on them while he was dying of mouth cancer at age 62. It was Twain who helped him negotiate to get a better publishing deal so that his wife would have something to live on after his death. It was Twain who would come to his house in the evening and read his pages, while he was anxiously waiting to see if he could see sufficient subscriptions to make it worthwhile to go ahead and publish "Huckleberry Finn."

But it was Grant, uncertain of his writing abilities and unsure of the market for his book, who sat, in great pain and with a scarf tied around his neck even in summer, and pounded out descriptions of the great battles of the Civil War, day after day, racing against the clock of his own death. Some days he wrote ten thousand words. In his last summer he waived off the narcotics offered by his doctor so that he could finish the book.

The book met with great success and according to Perry is the beginning of the great American tradition of well-written non-fiction.

It makes me sit up straighter and feel ashamed of every day I've looked at my computer and then just shrugged and decided I didn't feel like writing that day.