After leaving the presidency in 1877, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia embarked on a world tour that was to last two years, capturing the public imagination but depleting their savings in the process. Returning home, Grant invested in a Wall Street brokerage run by his son and a partner that went bust, leaving Grant essentially broke. His several articles on his Civil war campaigns for Century Magazine were popular and he was urged to write his memoirs. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant was the result – an autobiographical account focused on his military career during the Mexican-American and Civil Wars written in the course of a year during which he learned he was dying of throat cancer. The two-volume set was published by Mark Twain shortly after Grant’s death, and was notable for the unique marketing campaign created by Twain, which enlisted ten thousand veterans to canvass the North using a script written by Twain to sell the sets in versions ranging in price from $3.50 to $12.00, based on the binding. The effort generated sales of 350,000 sets and provided Grant’s family with a 75% net share of the royalties, an amount of $450,00 worth over $10 million today. The book was a critical success as well. Mark Twain compared it favorably with Caesar’s Commentaries… “the same high merits distinguished both books—clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level.”

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