PRESIDENT GRANT, THE WRITER.

PRESIDENT GRANT, THE WRITER. Ta-Nahisi Coates had a recent article on the Atlantic site attacking the frequently-seen claim that Ulysses Grant’s MEMOIRS are good because Mark Twain helped write them. He quotes Aaron Lisec, one of the editors of Grant’s papers, who says that much of the manuscript is in Grant’s handwriting and the rest of it is accounted for by secretaries who were hired to take dictation. I can imagine a casual and mistaken assumption that Twain was involved in the writing of Grant’s book because Twain’s new company published it and because Grant’s book is a great book and Twain was a genius. I am glad to see that there is hard evidence for Grant’s authorship in the manuscripts. In addition, there is the stylistic evidence from Grant’s other writings—his orders to his generals—as I will discuss in tomorrow’s post.