"Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Part 5." by Ulysses S. Grant is an autobiography written in 1884-1885. Racing against terminal throat cancer and personal bankruptcy, Grant chronicles his military career through the Mexican-American War and Civil War. Written explicitly for money to save his family from destitution, these memoirs became a publishing phenomenon. Mark Twain, Grant's close friend, orchestrated an unprecedented marketing campaign using Union veterans as door-to-door salesmen, transforming a dying man's final work into one of the nineteenth century's bestsellers. (This is an automatically generated summary.)