"Mark Twain" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab

Before he was known as Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 in rural Florida, Missouri. He moved to the nearby town of Hannibal on the Mississippi River when he was four. A high-spirited boy, he was described by his neighbor, Laura Hawkins (aka Becky Thatcher), as a barefoot kid who “came out of his house, opposite mine, and started showing off, turning handsprings and cutting capers.” Mark Twain’s penchant for showing off typified him until he died in 1910.

Ron Chernow chronicles Twain’s life over nearly four score years. The author keeps the 1033-page narrative moving by quoting from Twain’s profusion of interviews, diaries, and letters. Twain produced 30 books and several thousand magazine articles, all of which are now housed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Mark Twain Papers and Project has gathered more than 12,000 letters written by Mark Twain and his family, as well as 19,000 written to them or about them. The Twain repository maintains 46 Twain notebooks, 300 original photographs, and 600 unpublished manuscripts. To put it another way, Chernow had access to an immense number of sources for this doorstopper of a book.

Chernow puts us in the pilot house with Twain as he captains riverboats up and down the Mississippi River. We journey with Twain as he travels coast to coast, delivering countless public lectures that employ his satirical, exaggerated style on nearly every topic. For instance, he called President Theodore Roosevelt “The most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War,” a man “always hunting for a chance to show off.”

When making an around-the-world tour, Twain did not hold back and satirized incidents in every country. When lecturing in Bendigo, Australia, he complained about the hotel accommodations, “Originally an idiot went through here and decided that in country hotels... the clothes should be placed so high as to make a step ladder necessary. Just as in America, some idiot decided that the mirrors should be so low as to require every middle-sized man to stoop.” Exaggeration became Twain’s modus operandi.

Twain married Olivia “Livy” Langdon in 1870. She was a beautiful and wealthy heiress from Elmira, New York, who was 10 years younger than her husband. Chernow writes this was “a marriage of mutual adoration” that produced “three bright, beautiful and affectionate daughters.” It was in Elmira that Twain wrote some of his most well-known works, including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Life on the Mississippi,” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

  During what the author calls “the halcyon days,” from 1874 to 1891, the Twain family resided in a 25-room house in Hartford, Connecticut. The father established a publishing company and financed the “Paige Compositor,” an automatic typesetting machine that proved to be a failure. Twain’s business expenses soon overshadowed his income, and the publishing company declared bankruptcy. Insolvency forced the family to live in exile in Europe for nine years. It was there that Twain decided to embark on an extensive lecture tour to all four corners of the globe in an attempt to recover financially and pay off his creditors.

Chernow tells how Twain “captivated his listeners with wit and language alone, and didn’t embellish talk with artificial gestures, coming across as a folksy old gentleman, chatting heart-to-heart with his down-home audience, sometimes with hands plunged into his trouser pockets.” He would bait and challenge his audience, but never became brash or offensive. By the end of his life, he had paid off all his debts and lived financially secure.

Following the death of Livy and two of his daughters, Twain grew despondent and angry at what he saw happening in the world. The jingoistic rush by the United States into Panama and the Philippines appalled the satirist. As Chernow suggests, “more and more he doubted the ability of the American public to exercise independent judgment and believed that most people parroted what they heard from politicians and the press.” In Twain’s words: “We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country.” He mocked “that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”

In this exceptional work of scholarship, Chernow utilizes the extensive repository of Twain’s books and papers to capture the life of this native Missourian. Throughout the narrative, the author depicts Twain grappling with the United States’ western expansion, the pros and cons of industrialization, and the U.S. hostilities with other nations. He effectively portrays Twain’s interest in African American culture and his wrestling with the legacy of slavery. Chernow adroitly uncovers the fascinating and frustrating life of one of America’s quintessential characters.

Penguin Press is the publisher of “Mark Twain.” This 1174-page volume includes exceptionally well-organized endnotes, a thorough index, and two folios of photographs and images.

About the author: Ron Chernow is the author of seven previous books. He is the recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His first book, “The House of Morgan,” won the National Book Award. “Washington: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and “Alexander Hamilton”—the inspiration for the Broadway musical—won the George Washington Book Prize. He is one of only three living biographers to have won the Gold Medal for Biography of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author has received nine honorary doctorates.

Buy the Book.