The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant The Complete Annotated Edition

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There's material in the book Ulysses, famously, that's sexually explicit.

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do you want to join our Ulysses book group?

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When they did Ulysses, when they did the Odyssey, I was like, okay, but you know the dog because the dog can't shoot the arrow because he doesn't have any thumbs.

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The memoirs of US grant. Have you ever read that?

And he talks about Bastrop. He talks about when he was here writing the Mexican war.

What did he say? It was in Texas. I think it was Texas.

I got to show you two things, but I just read this book. It's just read this book, which you would look. It's called Grant's final victory.

So first off, you know what happens to him at the end, right? He basically, so after the war, he becomes, um, he joins this wall street firm, but he puts his entire fortune in it. His son is running it. He's working with this guy named Ferdinand Warrant. Who's basically like the Bernie Madoff of his day, but he doesn't know it.

So Grant becomes obscenely rich and then loses all of it.

And, um, so he's a broken man. He has to hawk his war mementos to JP Morgan, uh, just to live.

And so he starts to think about writing his memoirs. Cause he then, he has this problem with his tongue.

They find that he's dying of tongue cancer. And so he realizes that he's going to leave his family destitute.

So he starts to think of writing his memoirs.

And so he starts to write the memoirs, thinking about it. And then Mark Twain hears that he's doing this and comes by to say hi and just ask him about the contract.

And he basically realizes that Grant's about to get ripped off again.

And Twain is like, I'll give you the money and we'll self publish it. And you can take 50% of the profits and sets him up to do like a self publishing deal.

He realizes that this publishing company doesn't know what they're doing. And so Grant's basically dies like three days after he writes the memoirs and then they make the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars because Grant, because Mark Twain set him up so well. But the memoirs were incredible, right? Yeah.

They're so good. And people are, people thought they were so good.

People thought Mark Twain wrote them because he'd been involved. Um, but yeah, it's maybe the, it's maybe the greatest American literary memoir ever.

I mean, the reason I read it was because Mattis, so I'm talking to him and he said, what's a great thing to read? And he said, Mattis.

Well, I'll take you upstairs. I have a first edition of them. What you got to see.

And then I have, um, my other moment too is I have a ticket to his funeral. Really? Yeah. A ticket to his funeral.

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I was just talking to someone about Grant's memoirs. And one of the most striking parts of Grant's memoirs is just how scared he was to start at this school and how miserable the first year is for him.

I mean, they were younger than I think they were 15 or 16. And they're coming from these tiny farm towns and it's a much more brutal system in many ways.

It just you reminded me that they gave us that book. I probably have it around here on one of the shelves. You know, it's that thick and Grant wrote it. And then he died like a week after, you know, really shortly after he finished that memoir.

So definitely, you know, when you look at some of the history of West Point and individuals that made it through there, we draw on that.

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If you read Grant's memoirs from the Civil War...