The Last Chapter

THE LAST CHAPTER is a two-act play grounded in documented history. In 1884, Mark Twain offers Ulysses S. Grant, dying of throat cancer and financially ruined by a Wall Street swindler, an extraordinary publishing contract: seventy percent royalties on Grant’s Personal Memoirs. Over four scenes spanning fourteen months, from Twain’s Hartford parlor to a rented cottage at Mount McGregor, the two men argue, edit, and confess their way through the writing of one of the great works of American prose. Grant’s wife Julia and son Fred bear witness as Grant’s voice fails and his hand steadies only for the page, racing to finish an unflinching account of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Appomattox, and the failures of Reconstruction before his death. THE LAST CHAPTER is a story of friendship stripped of pretense by dying and debt, and of what it costs a man to tell the truth about his own life while there is still time to tell it.