by Brad Neely
First published 2024
Brad Neely throws out the biography playbook to chronicle Ulysses S. Grant from birth through his Civil War triumph over Confederate forces. This irreverent take strips away historical pomposity to reveal an American hero wrestling with familiar challenges. Grant struggles to juggle romantic relationships, military duties, and his pursuit of success in a young nation. Neely applies punk sensibilities and nerdy humor to expose the man behind the monument. The unconventional approach examines how traditional biography works by deliberately violating its conventions. Grant emerges as a flawed human being rather than a marble statue, someone who faced the same fundamental tensions between personal desires and public responsibility that readers recognize today. The book argues that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things by showing how this future president and general started as someone small and imperfect. Neely delivers both laughs and hope through his portrait of a complicated figure navigating love, war, and ambition in 19th-century America.
Genres: biography, american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, irreverent, thought-provoking
Tropes: flawed-hero, ordinary-to-extraordinary
Period: 19th Century
290 pages · Paperback · Keylight Books