Mark Twain

“Despite its size, Mark Twain reads like a novel. It does not serve as a testament but rather as a story where, even if readers know the ending, they look forward to the next chapter.”

Ron Chernow’s latest biography, Mark Twain, is particularly challenging because this thick volume competes with numerous other books, Twain’s writings (12,000 extant letters), and interviews. Even this great American writer’s notebooks and unfinished manuscripts survive. A controversial documentary by Ken Burns guarantees a readership already familiar with the subject.

Writing something readable becomes more important than something new on this subject.

Mark Twain is a modern biography of the subject. Race and even sex is a part of it. Chernow writes that his subject “was our greatest writer is arguable,” but he “had a literary voice that was wholly American” and, yet “bestrode a larger stage than any other American writer.”

“Our foremost talker,” who “fairly invented our celebrity culture.” The author describes him as a strong intellect and great writer who was crude, depressed, a prankster, smelly, undisciplined, and a vagabond.

This work, really five books in one, builds upon what has been said about Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) with the essential points, beginning with the subject’s “search for untrammeled truth and freedom.” Twain failed, perhaps, as this work shows; he never knew what he was looking for exactly.

Twain loved the freedom travel gave him, hoping to find his answers or at least some good stories along the way. He also changed, grew, and developed progressive ideas on racism and a disdain for the imperialism that others called civilization. His Innocents Abroad was the beginning of Twain as a noted author, not just a passing humorist.

This extraordinary man, Chernow writes, also makes the reader wonder how many other such lives are lost to history, but Twain’s storytelling ability and a story about a certain frog in Calaveras County that jump-started his literary career. Nor for the last time, would Twain succeed despite himself. A trip to Hawaii jump-started his career as a popular lecturer.

Several elements make this a thorough biography of the great American writer. Chernow mentions the Mississippi River, a nostalgic revulsion with progress (especially the decline of his beloved steamboats), race, and much more. Twain's humor barely covers a deep cynicism. A “fiercely pessimistic man” delivering “hard and uncomfortable truths,” he was never “overly solicitous of other people’s feelings.”

Although Twain had little use for genealogical frippery, Samuel Clemens provides a case study in the often financially desperate Southern middle-class family of his time. He lived as if his life were one of his novels, likely inspired by how he saw America around him and the passionate, cynical social commentator he became. He was the most colorful character he created and even appeared to foresee the ending of his own story.

Twain, herein, was not a part of the beginning nor the end of  19th century America, but the tremendous in-between, heart and soul. Chernow’s book draws on Twain’s varied career, which included “printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” “He could never fit in a conventional mold.”

An adventurer almost from birth, he traveled the world and wrote about what he saw through his lens of cynicism and exaggerated humor. He had already lived more of a full life than most Americans before he adopted the pen name Mark Twain, in February 1863, for reasons still debated.

The author writes of Twain as a great, underrated intellect of his age who still “spent a lifetime chasing hare-brained schemes and failed business ventures.” This victim of “cheap adventurers” coined the phrase “Gilded Age” for “its fondness for new inventions, quick killings, and high-pressure salesmanship.”

The author writes: “To portray Mark Twain in his entirety, one must capture both the light and the shadow,” including “a large assortment of weird sides to his nature.” Twain also had no use for robber barons but supported schemes to “rescue humankind from disease and suffering.”

“What any biography of Mark Twain demands is his intimate voice, which sparkled even in his darkest moments.” Chernow looks for the real Samuel Clemens in an unusual situation in which a deceased person leaves mountains of material where the subject bears his soul.

No mystery exists in what influenced the author of Huckleberry Finn. Twain left no secrets, including fearing becoming the failure his father had been, even as he had made similar mistakes in his own life. He was guilty of exaggerating and rewriting the truth rather than hiding it.

Chernow’s somewhat informal prose lends itself to the “non-fiction novel” (as Truman Capote called such work). Interpretations of such material can be controversial. Despite its size, Mark Twain reads like a novel. It does not serve as a testament but rather as a story where, even if readers know the ending, they look forward to the next chapter. Twain lived an extraordinary life of adventure around the world, and the reader shares it at his side.

This book includes annotation, a bibliography, and illustrations.