Ulysses S. Grant’s Great-Great-Grandson Is Alive—and Writing Erotic Vampire Novels

Shortly before his death on July 23, 1885, 18th U.S. President and Civil War veteran Ulysses S. Grant put the finishing touches on his two-volume autobiography, the aptly-titled Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Over a century later, his great-great grandson is keeping the family’s literary pursuits alive. Ulysses Grant Dietz is a prolific author of, among other works, vampire fiction.

1. Forging His Own Path
2. The Rise of Desmond Beckwith
3. A Family Legacy

Forging His Own Path

President Grant and his wife, Julia, had four children: Frederick, Ulysses Grant Junior, Jesse, and Ellen. Frederick had a son, Ulysses Grant III; he, in turn, had a daughter, Julia, who was Dietz’s mother. (She married John Dietz in 1945, giving Dietz his surname.)

Dietz, who was born in 1955, grew up in Syracuse, New York. As a child, he became a fan of vampire lore, particularly the Bela Lugosi Dracula films and the daytime soap Dark Shadows. That interest may have meant more to his identity than having a former president for a great-great-grandfather, a fact that wasn’t given much attention until Dietz attended boarding school in New Hampshire. (He preferred to be called Grant rather than Ulysses.) In his 2021 autobiography Growing Up Grant: A Gay Life in the Shadow of Ulysses S. Grant, Dietz recalls fielding criticism about his famous relative being a poor student, a poor president, and a drunk.

“Any one of these, in my experience thus far, would inevitably be brought up by anyone I met, as soon as they learned the reason I was called Ulysses,” Dietz wrote.

Dietz went on to Yale and later became a decorative arts curator and chief curator for Newark Museum, positions he held for a total of 37 years. Throughout his career, Dietz was writing—primarily books on ceramics, furniture, and other decorative art. Then, in 1988, Dietz returned to his childhood love of vampire mythology and composed a draft of Desmond: A Novel About Love and the Modern Vampire.

The Rise of Desmond Beckwith

The character of Desmond Beckwith was, he said, a reaction to the Anne Rice Lestat books of the era, which had begun with Rice's Interview With the Vampire in 1976. Desmond is 200 years old, wealthy, but—as vampires often are—lonely. He soon encounters Tony, a mortal love interest, while living in New York and under the specter of a serial killer as well as homophobia.

Desmond is also a bit of a vampire contrarian. He’s reluctant to kill anyone to satisfy his appetites and is agreeably charitable with his fortune. The eroticism is somewhat chaste: “Their lovemaking,” Dietz writes in the book, “was like a spring breeze to Desmond’s winter-bruised soul.”

Desmond saw print in 1998, with Dietz being credited on the cover as “Ulysses G. Dietz.” A sequel, Vampire in Suburbia, was released in 2012. (In between, Dietz said, he and his now-husband, Gary, were busy raising their children.) In the second book, Desmond moves to New Jersey in a continued search for human connection.

“In the first book, Desmond is surprised by love,” Dietz told HuffPost in 2012. “He has resigned himself to a life alone over the course of two centuries. Yet he lives in the world. He has secrets he has to keep from the world. It's a delicate balance he maintains, and then the carefully constructed life he’s made for himself is shattered by the appearance of Tony Chapman. Desmond is a romantic; although he’s a vampire, he loves life. In the second book, Desmond gradually realizes that he doesn’t really like living in isolation, without friends. It’s this quest for connection that drives him. At the end of the first book his story was, in a sense, only beginning. I had to write the second book to bring Desmond’s personal search to some sort of closure.”

A Family Legacy

In between writing and publishing the first Desmond novel, Dietz became more closely associated with his presidential heritage. In 1994, he led action to persuade the National Park Service to restore Grant’s Tomb, the famed resting place of Grant and Julia, in New York’s Riverside Park; the monument had become deteriorated and overrun with graffiti. He later became Vice President of Acquisitions for the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, a comparatively staid organization that Dietz didn’t think would be the target audience for his vampire fiction.

“I’m imagining lots of embarrassed silence,” Dietz told HuffPost. “I don’t think the Civil War buffs are going to even notice it exists.”

While Desmond has its followers among fans of vampire fiction, it may be hard for the series to top President Grant’s success in publishing. His memoirs, which were overseen and published by Mark Twain, netted his widow roughly $450,000 in royalties, the equivalent of $10 million today.

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