Ulysses S. Grant

Allen, Walter, 1840-1907Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.5

Word count: 148K words
Chapters: 15

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Ulysses S. Grant by Walter AllenAuthor: Allen, Walter, 1840-1907,Language: English, Class: E660: History: America: Late nineteenth century (1865-1900), Release Date: Mar 22, 2009

Editor's review

Ulysses S. Grant is not an academic biography in the modern sense but a popular heroic sketch written for general readers by the nineteenth-century English writer Walter Allen. At under two hundred pages, it traces Grant's entire life in a clear timeline, from son of an Ohio tanner to commander of the Union armies and then eighteenth president. Allen's language has a Victorian loftiness; battle scenes read like news sketches, while political passages mix narrative and comment, praising Grant's candor while not avoiding the shadow cast on his presidency by corruption among associates. Notably, Allen wrote shortly after Grant's death, drawing on newspapers, battle reports, and contemporaries' recollections: vivid in detail but inevitably limited by its time, with clear Northern positions on the morality of the Civil War and on Reconstruction. Read as a contemporary's critical biography of a contemporary, it shows how nineteenth-century Americans made Grant a symbol of national unity and how his almost wooden stubbornness was magnified by circumstance into historical force. Reading it today is like listening in from the Gilded Age: you hear the applause of the time and can also sense where the echo distorts.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Beginning readers interested in Civil War and Reconstruction history
Enthusiasts of how nineteenth-century British and American popular writing shaped heroic narrative
Commuters who want a short overview of Grant's life
Scholars studying transatlantic Anglo-American cultural intertextuality in the Victorian period

Not a good fit for

Grant researchers requiring strict scholarly footnotes and academic debate
Readers who reject nineteenth-century celebratory rhetoric and seek coolly objective narrative

Reading tips

Read the main text first for the outline, then closely read the brief comments at the end of each chapter as period specimens to sense nineteenth-century moral judgment.
Read alongside a modern Grant biography (such as Ron Chernow's) to quickly see differences in source selection and value judgment.
If interested in military detail, prepare a map of the 1864 Virginia theater and mark Grant's advance route while reading.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

How does this book differ from Ron Chernow's Grant?

Allen's book is a nineteenth-century popular critical biography, short and without footnotes, mainly celebratory; Chernow's is a thick twenty-first-century biography based on archival research, with detailed sources and a more cautious stance.

How does the book evaluate the scandals of Grant's presidency?

Allen acknowledges that events such as Crédit Mobilier left stains but blames surrounding politicians more, emphasizing Grant's personal honesty and trust in others.

Why would an English author write a biography of an American general?

Walter Allen aimed to introduce the hero of American unification to the British public and, through Grant's story, reflect Victorian ideas of steadfast character, giving the book a measure of transatlantic cultural comparison.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Allen, Walter, 1840-1907 Author

Walter Allen (1840–1907) is an author about whom very little biographical information survives; publicly available sources are limited, and his nationality, education, and professional career cannot be reliably established. What can be confirmed is that he wrote Ulysses S. Grant, the only work by him held in this collection. Judging by its subject, the book deals with Grant, the Union commander in the American Civil War and later President of the United States, and belongs to the genre of biography or biographical assessment, typically following its subject's military career and political life while attending to the historical background and to the portrayal of character. Because further direct materials are lacking, the book's specific edition, stylistic features, and contemporary reception remain to be verified; readers and researchers may regard it as an early English biographical text on Grant's life and should consult it alongside other historical sources.