The Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant

On the verge of death and in a state of poverty, former US president Ulysses S. Grant sat down to write his memoirs in 1885. One year later he was finished, and The Personal Memoirs of General U.S. Grant became an immediate best-seller. He died a week later.

His memoirs are considered one of the best of their kind from any leader, or as Mark Twain put it: "The best [memoirs] of any general since Caesar." What makes this work special is that Grant avoids the pitfalls of defensiveness, or blaming old enemies as other Civil War generals were doing at the time, while it reveals his greatness of spirit in a personal down-to-earth manner. And as a last triumph, Grant's memoirs earned his destitute family a small fortune, securing them after his passing.