"This latest work from award winning playwright John Guare, author of House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, addresses ideas of history and memory, fame and ignominy, reason and insanity, with trademark Guare imagination. It's 1885. Ulysses S. Grant is penniless and dying of throat cancer in his Fifth Avenue brownstone while struggling to finish his memoirs. He's continuously cajoled and pestered by everyone from his wife and children to his publisher, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), to - via drugged hallucinations - the Emperor of Japan. Although he completes his memoirs eventually, the audience is left questioning their accuracy, and, ultimately, the authenticity of history itself."--BOOK JACKET.