Mark Twain
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025• A Washington Post and New York Times Notable Book • Named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus Reviews
“Comprehensive, enthralling . . . Mark Twain flows like the Mississippi River, its prose propelled by Mark Twain’s own exuberance.” —The Boston Globe
“Chernow writes with such ease and clarity . . . For all its length and detail, [Mark Twain] is deeply absorbing throughout.” — The Washington Post
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 Twain
Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.
In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; 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 thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We all know Mark Twain: frontier adventurer turned sharp-witted chronicler of America’s triumphs and contradictions. But Pulitzer-winning biographer Ron Chernow delivers a fascinating, revealing portrait of the man behind the myth. In Chernow’s capable hands, Samuel L. Clemens emerges as a strong-willed, mischievous boy who grows into a brilliant, skeptical observer of race, religion, and politics. But he was also an easy mark for get-rich-quick schemes that sometimes brought his family to the brink of ruin. Chernow makes vivid use of Twain’s vast personal archives to illuminate his private world, especially his devoted partnership with his brilliantly clever wife, Olivia, who emerges as the book’s secret hero. And Chernow’s unpacking of the ongoing debates around Huckleberry Finn is fascinating, as is his emotional depiction of Clemens’ increasingly tragic later life. This nuanced, immensely readable biography is just brilliant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Another Chernow Triumph
I always look forward to Chernow’s biographies, because while some might say they can be exhausting, I find no one does a better job of contextualizing the world his subject inhabits. I really felt like I was given a living-breathing window into the world of mid 1850s to the end of that century.
As for the book itself, I enjoyed it as I knew nothing of Mark Twain and used this opportunity to give Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn a read. When I had been exposed to him, I found him hokey and old fashioned and while I could appreciate his wit I don’t think there was a single time I laughed at any of his observations. Comedy ages like milk, so they say, and Twain’s stuff is no exception. I can appreciate that it’s important but I’ll likely never read his other stuff.
Still though, I enjoyed this biography, I hope Chernow does another literary one before he is through. Maybe on Faulkner or Fitzgerald.