When Grant is remembered, he is too often described as a simple man of action, not of ideas. Pulitzer Prize–winning Grant biographer William S. McFeely declared, “I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic, or intellectual specialness.” Describing Grant’s midlife crisis: “The only problem was that until he was nearly forty, no job he liked had come his way—and so he became a general and president because he could find nothing better to do.”
