“We are all well,” he wrote his daughter, Nellie, at the end of November 1883. Still a spry man entering his late 50s, Grant indulged his wanderlust, embarking on a two-year around-the-world tour, before finally settling in New York City, where he and his wife, Julia, made a home in a roomy brownstone on East 66th Street a few blocks from Central Park. His life after leaving the White House had been happier than not.
Grant’s status as a Civil War hero helped him win the presidency twice (18) during the rough-and-tumble Reconstruction years. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army at Appomattox in April 1865, ending the grisly four-year conflict. When the Civil War erupted, he sided with the North and returned to uniform, rising from captain of a volunteer company to commanding general of the Union Army in four years. In the 1850s, he traded soldiering for civilian life, resulting in some hardscrabble years with his wife, Julia, and their four children. The son of an Ohio tanner, Grant had scraped through West Point but fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War. He didn’t need the money and “he was not a literary person.”Ĭlemens-and many others-thought it was a missed opportunity, given Grant’s colorful career and place in American history. Even when Clemens, his good friend and cigar-smoking buddy, broached the idea, Grant demurred. Grant, Civil War hero and two-term president, had always declined offers to write his memoirs. “That was all I heard,” wrote Clemens in his autobiography, “and I thought it great good luck that I was permitted to overhear them.” “Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his Memoirs and publish them? He said so, to-day, in so many words,” said one. The cloudy night and weak glow of the gaslights made it difficult to figure out their identities, but Clemens could hear what they were saying. Living off book royalties made for precarious finances, which is why Clemens worked the lecture circuit and dabbled in business.Īs he walked home, two men emerged from a building ahead of him, continuing their conversation on the sidewalk. His new novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would debut in England and Canada in three weeks, and in the United States in February. The 48-year-old former newspaperman had become a household name with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and Life on the Mississippi (1883). November had brought with it both cold and rain, leaving only a few brave souls on the dark streets.Ĭlemens had appeared as his alter ego, Mark Twain, the mustached writer and raconteur, who could enrapture a crowd as easily as a reader. In late 1884, after delivering an evening lecture at Chickering Hall, Samuel Clemens ventured out into the soggy New York City night.
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