Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
Civil Warriors
By C. Vann Woodward
Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
edited by Mary Drake McFeely, edited by William S. McFeely
Library of America, 1,199 pp., $35.00
William Tecumseh Sherman: Memoirs
edited by Charles Royster
Library of America, 1,136 pp., $35.00
These two famous Civil War memoirs, Grant's published in 1885, Sherman's in 1875, are linked in many ways, including the close relations of the authors and the common subject matter of their books. It is well that they are revived and republished simultaneously in the Library of America series, for both are still readable and quite worth reading. The praise lavished upon them for their literary merits over the years has probably not been uninfluenced by the high place the old heroes had won in national history. Gertrude Stein and Edmund Wilson were enraptured by Grant's prose, and Mark Twain compared his book with the Commentaries of Julius Caesar—though admittedly Twain was Grant's publisher. Whatever their relative literary merits may be, few would dispute their claim to first place on the vast shelves of Civil War memoirs, the two with which to start—at least among those from the Union side.
Review, 4293 words
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