He once advised his son that, in order to win respect, “never deceive nor act an artificial part. Matthew Arnold found the author to be “humane, simple, modest from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free.” As a reader, you want to believe - you have to believe - that an absence of artifice defined Grant the man as well as Grant the writer. If Grant’s voice is never confessional, it almost never rings false. What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity. GRANT ($39.95), now available in a richly annotated new edition from Harvard University Press, edited by the historian John F. Its title is THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. Stranger still, he barely acknowledged in his book that he had served two terms as president of the United States. Oddly, the author of perhaps the most widely acclaimed of all American memoirs endured dark personal struggles but wrote nothing about them. The genre flung open one of the first windows in our culture of self-exposure, well before social media arrived and took down the last curtains. That overstates things a bit, but he has a point. He describes it as a contest to reveal the most appalling family secret. “Memoir in America is an atrocity arms race,” Calvin Trillin writes.
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