Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Ron Chernow

Book - 2025

"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 settle...d 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 Drawing on Twain's bountiful archives, including his fifty notebooks, thousands of letters, and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures a man whose career reflected the country's westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars.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"--

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Subjects
Twain, Mark, > 1835-1910.
Authors, American > 19th century > Biography.
Humorists, American > 19th century > Biography.
Écrivains américains > 19e siècle > Biographies.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures.
HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.
American authors > Biography.
Humorists > Biography.
Biography.
Biographies.
Genres
Biography
Biographies
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Ron Chernow (author)
Physical Description
xxi, 1174 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 1045-1136) and index.
ISBN
9780525561729
  • Prelude: The pilot house
  • Part one: Afloat. Loveless marriage
  • A wild and mischievous boy
  • Printer's devil
  • "Darling existence"
  • "A ragged and dirty bunch"
  • "The most lovable scamp"
  • "Heaven on the half shell"
  • "Land of indolence and dreams"
  • "Grave of a blood relation"
  • A branch of hell
  • "My honored 'sister'" ; Wedding present
  • Part two: Floodtide. Church of the holy speculators
  • Mississippi steamboat and a cuckoo clock
  • Chartering a comet to Mars
  • "Invertebrate without a country"
  • Toast to the babies
  • "Inspired bugger of a machine"
  • "Hallelujah Jennings"
  • Twins of genius
  • "A sound heart & a deformed conscience"
  • Pure mugwump
  • Reparation due to every Black man
  • "No pockets in the armor"
  • "The deriding of shams"
  • Death and delusion
  • "One of the Vanderbilt gang"
  • Part three: Rapids. "Paradise of the rheumatics"
  • "A lady above reproach"
  • "Boss machine of the world"
  • "Too much of a human being"
  • "Paris the damnable"
  • "'Colossal' is a tame word for him"
  • "Clown of the sea"
  • "Circumnavigation of this great globe"
  • "The only sad voyage"
  • "A book written in blood & tears"
  • "Letters to Satan"
  • "Stirring times in Austria"
  • "The European Edison"
  • Dream self
  • "A hundred capering clowns"
  • "The bastard human race"
  • Part four: Whirlpool. "The ancient mariner"
  • The Anti-doughnut Party
  • "The United States of lyncherdom"
  • "Magnificent panorama of the Mississippi"
  • "Spirit of a steam engine"
  • Divine healing
  • The dread cavalcade of death
  • "The war prayer"
  • "An artist in morals and ink"
  • "The swindle of life"
  • Pier 70
  • Angelfish
  • A fan and a halo
  • Wuthering Heights
  • Part five: Shipwreck. Man in the white clothes
  • "A real American college boy" ; "All the wonders that are occurring"
  • A holiday from life's woes
  • Innocence at home
  • "Mark Twain's daughter"
  • The death of Tammany
  • "An insane idea"
  • Grandpa Twain
  • Letters from the Earth
  • "An old bird of paradise"
  • Halley's comet.
Review by Booklist Review

Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer Chernow, best known for his authoritative works on such political figures as Hamilton, Washington, and Grant, here examines the life of one of our most celebrated literary figures with equally remarkable results. Samuel Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, was a precocious and restless child who detested school. His first love was the Mississippi River, where he served as a river-boat pilot until the Civil War erupted. Sam served briefly in the Confederate army until he travelled to San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), where he began writing in earnest and adopted his nom de plume, Mark Twain. The adventures continued on a grand overseas tour, providing material for The Innocents Abroad, Twain's best-selling book during his lifetime. His story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" became a sensation and led to a successful lecture tour, allowing Twain to hone his famous wit. Chernow is an exceptional portraitist, adding depth and shadow to bring his subject fully to life. The impeccable research blends seamlessly into a narrative that examines Twain in all his guises: devoted family man, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, and inventor. Like his subject, Chernow has a keen ear for the perfect quote, insult, and witty rejoinder. This monumental achievement will stand as the definitive life of Mark Twain.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bestseller Chernow (Grant) again proves himself among his generation's finest biographers with this magisterial account of the life of Mark Twain (1835--1910). Recounting Twain's Missouri upbringing, Chernow suggests that the writer's humor and antipathy toward authority developed in opposition to his father, a stern county judge "who discovered no charm in juvenile antics." Chernow sheds light on the making of Twain's classic works, describing, for instance, how he was ambivalent about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even contemplated burning the unfinished manuscript before completing it in a burst of creativity that saw him churn out 4,000 words per day. Highlighting less well-known aspects of Twain's life, Chernow discusses the development of Twain's political outlook in his early 30s while working as private secretary to a Republican senator from Nevada, and his impassioned condemnation of the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in articles throughout his career. Chernow's razor-sharp portrait offers nuanced explorations of Twain's many contradictions--noting, for instance, that Twain condemned Gilded Age barons as greedy even as he almost single-mindedly sought to amass his own fortune--as well as unvarnished assessments of his flaws, which, in Chernow's telling, included surrounding himself with 10- to 16-year-old girls, whom he regarded as his "pets," after his wife's death. Amply justifying the considerable page count, this stands as the new definitive biography of the revered author. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America's greatest writer. It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life andAlexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president's Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain's inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author's life. As Chernow writes, Twain was "a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick." He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain's flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that "evolution in matters of racial tolerance" is one of the great strengths of Chernow's book). Harder to explain away is Twain's well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting "angel-fish" to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, "It isn't the public's affair." While Twain emerges from Chernow's pages as the masterful--if sometimes wrathful and vengeful--writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist. Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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