The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Edited With An Introduction By Elizabeth D. Samet, c. 2019.
A Liveright Annotated History.
Incredibly good book and perhaps the heaviest / densest book I have in my library.
Table of Contents: 8 pages.
Editor's Note: pages xv - xxi
A Note On The Text: xxiii - xxiv
Editor's Introduction: Reintroducing Ulysses S. Grant, pages xxv - lxxiv
Volume I: starts on page 3.
Preface
Chapter 1: Ancestry -- Birth -- Boyhood
Volume II: starts on page 509.
Chapter 40: ..... Arrival at Chattanooga
Chapter 41: Assuming the Command at Chattnooga
Chapter 55: ..... Cold Harbor ...
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Introduction
The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Edited With An Introduction By Elizabeth D. Samet, c. 2019.
I've read his Memoirs twice, and maybe parts of his Memoirs several times. I doubt I will ever read the complete annotated volume edited by Elizabeth D Samet, and I won't read it from start to finish, but will read the parts I want to read when I want to read them and in the order I want to read them.
Tonight, of course, I'm reading her introduction. Absolutely fascinating.
A list of the authors US Grant and his fellow students read when they were at the US Military Academy (West Point):
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton: eclectic, versatile
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Frederick Marryat: seafaring novels
- Walter Scott
- Washington Irving, a local celebrity living near West Point in the Hudson Valley
- Charles James Lever
The editor's information on Sir Walter Scott and his (Walter Scott's) connection to the US Civil War is an incredible piece of sleuthing and/or observation.
I don't think the publishers could have found an editor better "fit" for this job -- being the editor of this annotated volume. From the introduction, one sees that Elizabeth D Samet knows her stuff. Page xxxvi, at the bottom:
The British writer Robert Southey coined the term autobiography in 1809 ... the early biographers were often soldiers or saints ... the tradition of lives by people ... arguably began with Michel de Montaigne in the late sixteenth century, and it includes a range of writers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Gertrude Stein, Lillian Hellman, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.
Its rich international history notwithstanding, life writing occupies a special place in the cultural history of the United States. "Autobiography," the critic Jay Parini suggests, "could easily be called the essential American genre, a form of writing closely allied to our national self-consciousness."
When Grant was coming of age as a reader during the antebellum period, the field already included seventeenth-century Puritan spiritual autobiographies, Indian captivity narratives, and travel memoirs. To these would be added artistically as well as politically significant slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, among others. There was also the watershed Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, first published in the United States in 1818. Franklin's repurposing of autobiography, which before him had been devoted to spiritual betterment, as a chronicle of intellectual, social, and financial as much as moral self-improvement launched a secular tradition that would eventually encompass Henry Adams, P. T. Barnum, and Grant himself. By the time Grant started writing his memoirs in the mid-1880s, a postbellum flood of Civil War reminiscences had already gathered considerable momentum. Stylistic and political fashions would change in the ensuing decades, but the American enthusiasm for life writing has never diminished.
