The first half of Mary Perry’s Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship that Changed America covers familiar ground to anyone who’s read a biography of Grant, but does include a brief story of Mark Twain’s life interspersed as well.
The last part of the book gets to the relationship between Twain and Grant. The general and ex-president had already decided to write his memoirs and he wanted to finish the text before he died of throat cancer in order to provide for his wife Julia. But Twain offered Grant a much better deal financially than the publisher who originally approached Grant, which wound up making a huge difference to Julia’s finances after her husband’s death.
The story of how Twain helped Grant publish his memoirs has also been told in other books, especially the recent Grant’s Tomb by Louis Picone, but there’s more detail in Perry’s account. What I haven’t encountered elsewhere is how Grant influenced Twain. It turns out that getting to know Grant more closely may have helped Twain unblock his stalled progress on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and change the direction of the second half of the book.
Perry concludes that the collaboration of Twain and Grant produced the two great masterpieces of American literature: Huck Finn for fiction and Grant’s memoirs for non-fiction. It’s a big claim, but well worth considering in light of the support that Perry provides.