Captain Grant

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1946. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good. 606 pages. Cover has some wear and soiling. Bookplate inside front cover. Shirley Seifert was born in St. Peters, Missouri, just west of St. Louis, and has lived all her life in that vicinity. While taking graduate work in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, she was urged to try fiction, and soon after that she sold her first short stories to the American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. After 1935, she devoted herself to the historical novel and completed several which were acclaimed. Derived from a Kirkus review: This is tops in reading interest. Shirley Seifert has made her portrait in terms so convincing, so plausible, so deeply rooted in a sympathetic understanding of those forces that made Grant the man he was, that he emerges a fully realized person. This makes the reader live wholly in those early formative years, the years at West Point, reluctantly undertaken by a country boy who wanted to raise horses; the years of slow motion advance, impeded by the dislike and misunderstanding of a few in authority, by unfortunate and ill-founded gossip, by bad luck in military assignments. But warmed, too, by friendships that counted through life, and by the one great love which withstood separation, disillusionment and poverty- between 'Lyss and Julian Dent Grant. Through these pages one meets as boys and men people like Sherman and Longstreet and Ewell, Robert E. Lee, Pope and McClellan, and many another comrade who later held posts of distinction in the war which begins just as ""Captain Grant"" accepts the lowly assignment as commander of the 7th district regiment Illinois Volunteers.