TECHNOLOGY FOCUS - ORGANIC CHEMISTRY - Preferred Method: The method further comprises washing the produced readily saccharifiable biomass with the solvent solution, and the production steps are repeated one or more times. The lignocellulosic biomass is subjected to preprocessing prior to the first step. The heated suspension is cooled to room temperature before filtration. The filtered biomass is dried. The method also comprises saccharifying the readily saccharifiable biomass with an enzyme consortium to produce fermentable sugars, and fermenting the sugars to produce a target product. Preferred Component: The manganese(III) salt is manganese(III) triacetate and/or manganese(III) acetylacetonate; and is present at 15, preferably 5 wt.% of the weight of dry biomass. The solvent solution comprises an alcohol selected from methanol, ethanol, n-propanol, isopropanol, n-butanol, 2-butanol, isobutanol, and/or t-butanol. The solvent solution contains 0-100, preferably 25-75% (v/v) ethanol. The dry weight of biomass is at a concentration of 15-70 wt.% of the weight of the biomass-solvent suspension. The target product is ethanol, butanol, or 1,3-propanediol. EXAMPLE - A slurry of corn cob (2.004 g) in ethanol (8 mL) was added with manganese(III)acetate (0.1 g), and the mixture was heated to 150 degrees C for 6 hours in air. Upon cooling, the reaction mixture was filtered and washed with 8 mL ethanol, followed by 8 mL acetone. The residue was dried in vacuo at room temperature to afford 1.804 g residue (90% mass recovery) and then ground through a 2 mm sieve. The ground residue (pretreated corn cob) was saccharified by adding citrate buffer (4.093 mL, pH=5), Accellerase 1000 (RTM: cellulase) (46.3 mu L) and Multifect CX 12L (RTM: enzyme cocktails) (26.7 mu L) to the pretreated corn cob (0.499 g), and the mixture was left stirring in an incubator/shaker at 48 degrees C. Samples were taken every 24 hours and analyzed by HPLC to determine the monomeric sugar yields versus time. Saccharification yield after 48 hours for glucose was 38.2 and xylose was 33.5.