Mark Twain
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75/99
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72/99
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About This Book
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark TwainRon Chernow, the highly lauded biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, brings his considerable powers to bear on America's first, and most influential, literary celebrity, Mark Twain. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, under Halley's Comet, the rambunctious Twain was an early teller of tall tales. He left his home in Missouri at an early age, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and arrived in the Nevada Territory during the silver-mining boom. Before long, he had accepted a job at the local newspaper, where he barged into vigorous discourse and debate, hoaxes and hijinks. After moving to San Francisco, he published stories that attracted national attention for their brashness and humor, writing under a pen name soon to be immortalized.Chernow draws a richly nuanced portrait of the man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune and crafted his celebrity persona with meticulous care. Twain eventually settled with his wife and three daughters in Hartford, where he wrote some of his most well-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, earning him further acclaim. He threw himself into American politics, emerging as the nation's most notable pundit. While his talents as a writer and speaker flourished, his madcap business ventures eventually forced him into bankruptcy; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain's bountiful archives, including his fifty notebooks, thousands of letters, and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures a man whose career reflected the country's westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars. No other white author of his generation grappled so fully with the legacy of slavery after the Civil War or showed such keen interest in African American culture. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain's writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer's talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.
Reviews
"Despite its formidable accumulation of facts, Ron Chernow's maximalist portrait finally sinks under its own weight."
"He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain's art, or for the literary context of his era."
"Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain's very American prose."
"For all its heft, this latest treatment adds little that's substantively new ..."
"But he tells the whole story, in all its glory and sorrow ..."
"This monumental achievement will stand as the definitive life of Mark Twain."
"Amply justifying the considerable page count, this stands as the new definitive biography of the revered author."
"Normally, this would be a signal weakness in a biography — shape and form do matter — but Chernow writes with such ease and clarity that even long sections on, say, Twain's business ventures prove horribly fascinating ..."
"More than simply a book about America's seminal writer, this is a long and winding story about the quintessential American — clothes and buttons, mind and heart, warts and all."
"Chernow has brought us as close to Twain as we are likely to get, and this nuanced portrait of an often conflicted man is a triumph."
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