Grant: A Novel - Hardcover

Byrd, Max

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553096338 ISBN 13: 9780553096330

Publisher: Bantam, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Devotees of the historical novel will find much to admire in Max Byrd's tightly written and consistently entertaining glance backward at General U.S. Grant's failed attempt to win a third presidential term. In life, Grant was an inscrutable character. He spoke little, wrote little, remained faithful to his wife, and seems to have devoted all the extravagance in his nature to alcohol. He had been an indifferent student at West Point and a conscientious but undistinguished young officer. The years just before the Civil War were the lowest for him--all his business enterprises had soured. Grant had the opposite of the Midas touch: everything he put his hands on turned to mud, and his chronic drunkenness had led to his forced retirement from the army.

In short, in 1860 no one would have predicted that Ulysses S. Grant would become "the most famous man in the world," as one of the many incidental characters in Grant describes him. Shyness and a gift for profound silences began to work to his benefit later, during his political career. In a rare glimpse into his subject's inner world, Byrd follows the general's meandering train of thought as his advisors plot his third presidential campaign.

Outwardly, he was sure, nobody could have told that his mind was elsewhere, lazily turning over thoughts, memories, making similes. His mental process, he believed, resembled an old Missouri farmer digging at a stump, slowly prying it up from the dirt, excavating his idea.... He knew he seemed silent, impassive; he knew other people mistook that for strength.

It is a mark of the General's elusiveness that Byrd chooses not Grant himself but two reporters as his main characters. Sylvanus Cadwallader is a seasoned and cynical Chicago news hound. Much of what we learn comes from his no-holds-barred biography of the great commander, marked "not for publication" on the cover. His fellow journalist, a younger man named Nicholas Trist, was injured at Cold Harbor during the war, losing an arm to Grant's insistence on pushing through the rebel lines at any cost. Trist takes the opportunity of Grant's renewed presidential ambitions to return to Washington from Paris as a foreign correspondent. Within a few hours of his arrival in the capital, he falls in love with Elizabeth Cameron, the wife of a senator. Days later, he is granted an interview with Mark Twain. Soon he is acquainted with Clover and Henry Adams, and receiving the cherished confidences (for print, of course) of the general's closest advisors.

Trist's story is as interesting as Grant's, though on a smaller scale. The most vivid touches in this novel, however, are Byrd's incidental depictions of our continuity and discontinuity with the past. Although Nicholas Trist can read a sign advertising "Ivory Soap--99 and 44/100ths percent pure," he can also glance up at the wall of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Station in Washington and see seven clocks to which travelers adjust their watches, since each railroad company operated on its own time. Byrd's sense of fun pervades the novel and recalls his distinguished antecedent, Gore Vidal. He may not offer Vidal's magisterial sweep, nor his corrosive wit, but Byrd shows a similar infectious pleasure in bringing history to life. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover

Praise for the novels of Max Byrd:

"with Jackson, Byrd has vaulted into the front rank of American historical novelists."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Assiduously researched and full of action, emotion, and insight, Max Byrd's Jackson deserves to stand with the finest works of historical fiction."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Super historical fiction. With Jackson, Byrd has established himself as a preeminent historical novelist."
--associated press

"Brilliant...masterful...a magical meeting of history and fiction...Byrd is a gifted storyteller."
--The Knoxville News-Sentinel

"a wonderfully vivid novel that brings the Sage of Monticello to life. Jefferson has the organic intimacy of a novel that has sprung full-blown from the imagination of its creator."
--The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0553096338
• ISBN 13: 9780553096330
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368