Ulysses S. Grant

The general who won the Civil War and the President who tried to defend Reconstruction, who at the end of his life, broke and dying, wrote the finest memoir any American president has left. He finished it days before his death to clear his family's debts, and Twain published it. The prose is plain, exact, and unsentimental about the work of saving the Union. It is the rare great book written against the clock by a man with nothing left to prove and everything to settle.