When former first lady Julia Grant finished her memoir in 1899, with the help of one Mark Twain, she couldn’t find a publisher for it.

“My book, on which I have built so many castles, is by the critics pronounced too near, too close to the private life of [her husband], and I thought this was just what was wanted. You can well imagine my great disappointment and sorrow,” the widow of Ulysses S. Grant wrotein a letter to a friend.

Times, to put it mildly, have changed.