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Colby Cosh: The real American odyssey of Ulysses Grant

The story of the retired U.S. president's 1870s trip around the world is fascinating to behold

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The release of Christopher Nolan’s much-awaited Odyssey gives me — me and every other SOB with a lease on some newspaper real-estate — an excuse to blab about culture, specifically a delightful book I discovered earlier this year: John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant (1879). Most travel writing leaves me cold, but Young’s book is a product of unique circumstances, and I’m convinced it should have a much more prominent place in American literature than it holds. It is, in many ways, the forgotten sibling of Grant’s own war memoir, which remains in the front rank of all American nonfiction.

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Young was a 36-year-old journalist for the New York Herald who was recruited to tag along with retired U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant on an epic tour of the world that lasted from May 1877 to September 1879. (This gives the book added spice for a journalist of today, of course: imagine taking on a two-and-a-half-year assignment. With expenses covered!) Grant, exhausted by factional politics, had just left the presidency under a spreading cloud of scandal, but he had — at that moment — a large fortune built on investments and private gifts, and........

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