In 1884, the two most famous men in America came together to collaborate on one of the great works of American letters. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War and two-term president of the United States, was burdened by the twin disasters of a scam that took his family's fortune, and cancer, from which he would die in less than two years. Mark Twain's star was ascending; he was already America's most prominent author, and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" had been published that year.

Charles Bracelen Flood's "Grant's Final Victory" is the exhilarating and heroic story of the race to complete Grant's memoirs. Victims of a colossal swindle by a family friend named Ferdinand Ward, the Grant family was left virtually penniless. A short time after the debacle, it was found that Grant had throat cancer. Having determined that the only way to save his family was by writing his memoirs, Grant had a piece of good luck: Twain approached him. The two men had first met in 1869, after which Twain noted that the newly elected president struck him as having the "expression of a man who had not smiled for seven years, and was not intending to smile for another seven."

Spurred on by such support, Grant -- though at times so sick he could communicate only through messages on slips of paper -- forged ahead, while his family and friends debated whether the strain was too much. His daughter overheard someone say, " 'The book is killing him,' and another would reply, 'No, the book is keeping him alive; without it he would already be dead.'"

Twain supervised every detail, making sure he was "close at hand ... I want no mistakes to happen, nothing overlooked, nothing neglected." The result was two volumes, 1,215 pages of text totaling 291,000 words, a masterpiece of historical literature and prose that burned with a hard gem-like flame. "I feel," Grant wrote near the close of the book, "that we [the North and South] are on the eve of a new era ... the universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me to be the beginning of the answer to 'Let us have peace.'"

Grant finished his book at 4 in the afternoon on Monday, July 20, and died three days later. The memoirs were an instant bestseller, and the family's fortune was reestablished. "On December 23, 1857," says Flood, "he had pawned his gold watch for $22 to buy Christmas presents for Julia and their children." In the end, Grant succeeded at nothing in life except saving his country and writing one of the great books in American literature.

Allen Barra writes for American History and Military History magazines.