Twain’s twists and turns

Ron Chernow was going to write a short biography of Mark Twain but didn’t have time, so he wrote a long one. Which is to say, there’s no other way to do justice to a character so complex as Mr. Twain, one of the few writers who can make a valid claim to the title of America’s Greatest Novelist but whose reputation is defined by his idiosyncrasies nearly as much as by his accomplishments.

Checking in at just over a thousand pages before the notes begin, Chernow’s Mark Twain (Penguin, 1,200 pp.) thoroughly examines Twain’s life and creative output, from his childhood in Missouri to his twilight years in Connecticut. Chernow traces the many successes and failures of Twain’s multifarious endeavors, including his days as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi and his years as a journalist in San Francisco, the travel books which were his initial claim to fame and the novels which made him an international celebrity, and his many questionable attempts at becoming a business tycoon. But as with any difficult genius, Twain’s story is most interesting when Chernow plumbs the depths of his subject’s labyrinthine mind.

Mark Twain Ron Chernow

Born Samuel Clemens in 1835, Twain was a model of inconsistency. He was naturally charming but known for his temper. He was quick to make friends, but equally quick to lose trust; quick to build an alliance but quick to destroy it. And even as nostalgia was his stock-in-trade (as seen in books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), he was driven by a desire to play an important part in the progress of modernity. He believed the world was on the precipice of a better, more equitable era, and though primarily a humorist, he believed his work ought to work toward that progress (as seen in books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). He believed that technology would and should play a significant role in forming a new world—a philosophy that was in keeping with the ethos espoused by many of his late-19th-century intellectual peers—and he lived accordingly, both in his adoption of new technologies and in his belief that the old ways were an affliction to be cast off.

Chernow depicts Twain’s rejection of religious orthodoxy as the result of his iconoclastic and rebellious nature, but also of a mind never at rest, filled with doubts, questions, and insecurities alongside the creative capacity that made him one of America’s greatest storytellers. Twain wasn’t the first or the last great creative mind to be so burdened. But the engaging irony of Twain’s mind is what makes him so readable and so memorable a subject for a biography, a subject worthy of so hefty a tome.