Grant: A Novel

Like no one else writing in America today, Max Byrd, the critically acclaimed author of Jefferson and Jackson, makes history come alive.

Grant: A Novel is an unforgettable portrait of America's Gilded Age and the flawed, iron-willed, mysterious giant at its center who may well be our most uniquely American hero.

He was the nineteenth century's most famous drunkard. He was a failure at farming, business, and politics. A failure, indeed, at everything in life except war. And even in war, to his countrymen in the North, Ulysses S. Grant was the "Bloody Butcher of Cold Harbor" as much as he was the Hero of Vicksburg and Appomattox. Yet the gentle, martyred Lincoln found him a kindred spirit. And after Lincoln's assassination, a bereaved nation elected him President twice.

The year is 1880, and the Civil War is slowly receding into the past. Lincoln has been dead for fifteen years, and Grant--retired from his second scandal-ridden term in the White House--has just returned home from a triumphant world tour. Now, in the final political battle of his life, he tries for an unprecedented third presidential term. But in one of the most dramatic and tumultuous conventions in American history, he will be defeated for renomination in Chicago. A few months later he will go spectacularly bankrupt in New York--and at the same time learn that he has cancer of the throat.

Two journalists are busy describing the dying Grant for posterity: one with enthusiasm, the other with thinly veiled contempt. The supportive biographer, Chicago newspaperman Sylvanus Cadwallader, has covered Grant in the Civil War and seen the human being behind the General's grim, taciturn facade. The other journalist is Yale-educated Nicholas Trist, a wounded soldier who lost his arm to Grant's "butchery" at Cold Harbor.

Through their stories we enter the genteel but troubled drawing room of Grant's implacable enemy Henry Adams and his brilliant wife Clover. We meet old soldiers Sheridan and Sherman, Sherman's beautiful and reckless niece Elizabeth Cameron, and most of all we meet Grant's astonishing best friend, Mark Twain, the comic gadfly who makes the silent General speak.

But at the core is Grant himself: his unwavering humility and deep pride, his quixotic intelligence, his legendary battles with alcohol, depression, and his father. A moving and triumphant novel, deeply researched, factual, and dramatic, Grant penetrates to the heart of our elusive eighteenth President. The result is a stunning depiction of an ordinary man driven by history to an extraordinary life--a leader whose political fall marked the end of an American era.