Comeback Stories from History, Checked Against the Record

Comeback stories are a staple of self-improvement writing: a figure everyone respects, a low point, a recovery, a lesson. The shape is satisfying enough that the low point rarely gets checked.

So we took six well-known ones and looked at what the record says. Three hold up, and the details are stronger than the usual summaries. Two are partly true. One does not hold up. After them comes a question about the lesson these stories are usually asked to carry.

The one that was assembled later

Lincoln’s list is familiar. One common version runs: “Failed in business—1831. Defeated for legislature—1832. Sweetheart died—1835. Nervous breakdown—1836”, and so on, one setback after another, until “Elected president—1860”.

The list does not come from Lincoln’s lifetime. In a 2014 essay for Slate, Scott A. Sandage traced its spread to 1920, when William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service first wired it out as a filler story that was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers, magazines and books. Hearst credited it to “the Sing Sing Bulletin”, a prison newspaper, but the same short text had already appeared in several newspapers in 1918 and 1919, and a longer version had been published in 1915.

The defeats themselves were real. In 1856 Lincoln wrote privately that “with me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure.” But the list leaves out the wins. He was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1834, built a law practice, and was elected to the Thirtieth Congress in August 1846. His former private secretary, John G. Nicolay, listed the defeats himself in A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (published October 1902), and then wrote: “Failures? Not so. Every seeming defeat was a slow success.”

The list works because it has a rhythm. It is not a record.

The one most worth telling

Grant. It is told less often, perhaps because it is grimmer than the format usually allows.

Grant was a partner in Grant & Ward, a Wall Street firm his son had set up with Ferdinand Ward. On paper Grant was a millionaire. In fact Ward was running a Ponzi scheme, paying out dividends from new investments, and when the firm collapsed in May 1884 Grant lost his entire fortune. In History.com’s account he had $80 to his name, and his wife Julia had another $130.

He had turned down earlier suggestions, including Mark Twain’s, that he write his memoirs. Now, needing to pay back a loan and support his family, he turned to writing, first articles for Century Magazine. In October 1884 he learned he had incurable throat cancer. On 27 February 1885 he signed with Charles L. Webster and Company, the new publishing firm Twain had set up with his nephew, for a seventy percent royalty on the profits.

He worked through early 1885, at times writing as much as 10,000 words in a single day, and finished three days before he died on 23 July 1885. The National Park Service says the book was an instant best-seller and that the first payment to his widow was $200,000. History.com puts the sales at more than 300,000 copies of the two-volume set and Julia’s royalties at $450,000.

What the record does not contain is worth noticing: no epiphany, no mindset shift, no moment of deciding not to quit. A man who could write did the work available to him, against a clock, and it was enough.

What the true ones have in common

Put the three that hold up side by side (Grant, Shackleton and Churchill) and one thing repeats. In each, the turn came from a skill the person already had.

• Grant could write. His Personal Memoirs are still in print.
• Shackleton’s men got home partly because Frank Worsley could navigate. Shackleton chose him for the boat journey because of “his accuracy and quickness as a navigator”, and Worsley brought the James Caird to South Georgia with only four sightings of the sun on the way.
• Churchill kept doing the work he was known for. After losing the 1945 election he wrote his memoirs of the Second World War, which ran to six volumes (1948–1953/54), and he was prime minister again after the Conservative victory of 1951.

This is our reading of the cases, not a finding. Keeping going shows up in every one of these stories, and in many that ended badly, so it cannot be the whole explanation on its own. Persistence looks like the price of entry; the second skill looks like what turned the corner. It makes a worse poster, but it may be the more useful idea.

A different lesson

If you are in the bad part of one of these stories, the question the cases raise is not how do I keep going. You are probably already doing that.

It is what can I do that I have been treating as secondary, and can it be pointed at the problem in front of me.

Sometimes the answer is nothing, and the story does not end well. Those versions exist in far greater numbers than the ones that get printed, which is one reason these stories are worth checking. The same problem is the whole subject of survivorship bias.

Sources

• Scott A. Sandage, “‘I Have Never Been Up’: The persistent, powerful meme of Abraham Lincoln as a ‘failure at 50’”, Slate, 28 May 2014 (the failures list, the 1920 International News Service story and its earlier versions; Lincoln’s 1856 note).
• Abraham Lincoln, fragment on Stephen A. Douglas (1856), in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (1953).
• John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (Century, 1902), Project Gutenberg.
• US National Park Service, “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant”.
• Christopher Klein, “Bankrupt and Dying from Cancer, Ulysses S. Grant Waged His Greatest Battle”, History.com.
• Benjamin Shapell and Sara Willen, “Mark Twain Eulogizes General Grant, Whose Memoirs He Would Publish”, Shapell Manuscript Foundation, 11 August 2015 (the contract date).
• Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914–1917, Project Gutenberg.
• James Caird Society, “The James Caird”.
• Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, Edison: His Life and Inventions (1910), Project Gutenberg, for Walter S. Mallory’s recollection.
• Quote Investigator, “I Have Gotten a Lot of Results! I Know Several Thousand Things That Won’t Work” (2012, updated 2025).
• Vincent van Gogh, letter 855 to Anna van Gogh-Carbentus, 19 February 1890, Van Gogh Letters (Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING); Van Gogh Museum, “How many paintings did Vincent sell during his lifetime?”.
• Martin Bailey, “Why did Van Gogh fail to sell his work?”, The Art Newspaper, 3 June 2022.
• GOV.UK, “Past Prime Ministers: Sir Winston Churchill”; the Nobel Prize, “Winston Churchill: Biographical”; Churchill Archives Centre, “Sir Winston Churchill: a biography”.

Checked September 2026. Where an account is uncertain (how many paintings Van Gogh sold is the clearest case), this page says so rather than choosing the tidier number.

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