Grant's account of Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness and Appomattox, written in the last year of his life while cancer of the throat was killing him and his family faced ruin. He finished the manuscript a week before he died; Mark Twain published it and the royalties left his widow rich. The prose is plain to the point of severity, and it is the plainness that has kept it the finest memoir ever written by a soldier. Sixty plates of paintings by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, spanning 1770 to 1899, capture the American landscape and its soldiers that Grant's plain words bring to life.