Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

The thing which astounded me was, that, admirable man as Gilder certainly is, and with a heart which is in the right place, it had never seemed to occur to him that to offer General Grant $500 for a magazine article was not only the monumental insult of the nineteenth century, but of all centuries. He ought to have known that if he had given General Grant a check for $10,000 the sum would still have been trivial; that if he had paid him $20,000 for a single article the sum would still have been inadequate; that if he had paid him $30,000 for a single magazine war article it still could not be called paid for; that if he had given him $40,000 for a single magazine article he would still be in General Grant’s debt. Gilder went on to say that it had been impossible, months before, to get General Grant to write a single line, but that now that he had once got started it was going to be as impossible to stop him again; that, in fact, General Grant had set out deliberately to write his memoirs in full and to publish them in book form.