and this is esponse, this is your rebuttal of gertrude stein. [orange] and it's also, i wouldn't put so much of the weight on gertrude stein as more on people who have sort of misused that quote. because she was just talking about her childhood home. [smiry specific. [orange] and it was developed over. so in her "everybody's" autobiography, somebody asks her, "why don't you write about oakland?" "there is no there there." she's just talking about r experience. and so people have used it to say oakland has no character. and that is more a reflection on what people think of oakland or and trying to make oaknto than what her thoughts were. [smith] it may be as much a rebuttal of those people than of her. [orange] [smith] right. and oakland, as we'll come to in a second, is a character in this book. this book struck me, so i thought two things about this book. it's a portrait of america that we don't see and it's a portrait of americanwe don't see. there is not, as far as it goes, a lot of native american literature or native american storytelling a

some of the people who thought grants memoirs were important, matthew arnold, sherwood anderson, gertrude stein, 1920's writer, sinclair lewis, robert frost, and of course the modern. grant's position is as one of the great writers in american literary history. >> no one would have believed that when he was a cadet at west point. john: that is right. his wife dreamed he was president when he was losing his shirt in missouri. she told people, and they laughed. it just won't happen. he will never be president. >> your beginning conversation set this up perfectly. if anyone wants to read the handwritten manuscript of grant's memoirs, the library of congress has it. we have put the grant papers online. you can read for yourself all of his memoirs in his handwriting, and you can see the clear handwriting at the beginning. you can see when he is having a bad day because the handwriting changes drastically. >> what is the website to get to that? >> you can go on www.loc.gov and search digital collections. if you want to talk to me afterwards, i can explain how to get to it. in the featured items of th