Book excerpt: "Mark Twain" by Ron Chernow

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06-07-2025

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"Mark Twain" (Penguin Press), the latest book from Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant, examines the life of one of America's greatest and most beloved writers.
Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Robert Costa's interview with Ron Chernow on "CBS Sunday Morning" July 6!
"Mark Twain" by Ron Chernow
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Prelude
The Pilot House
From the time he was a small boy in Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi River had signified freedom for Samuel Langhorne Clemens (later known as Mark Twain), a place where he could toss aside worldly cares, indulge in high spirits, and find sanctuary from society's restraints. For a sheltered, small‑town youth, the boisterous life aboard the steamboats plying the river, swarming with raffish characters, offered a gateway to a wider world. Pilots stood forth as undisputed royalty of this floating kingdom, and it was the pride of Twain's early years that, right before the Civil War, he had secured a license in just two years. However painstaking it was for a cub navigator to memorize the infinite details of a mutable river with its shifting snags, shoals, and banks, Twain had prized this demanding period of his life. Later he admitted that "I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," the reason being quite simple: "a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth." In contrast, even kings and diplomats, editors and clergymen, felt muzzled by public opinion. "In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." That search for untrammeled truth and freedom would form a defining quest of Mark Twain's life.
For a man who immortalized Hannibal and the majestic river flowing past it, Twain had returned surprisingly few times to these youthful scenes, as if fearful that new impressions might intrude on cherished memories. In 1875, as he was about to turn forty, he had published in the Atlantic Monthly a seven‑part series titled "Old Times on the Mississippi," which chronicled his days as an eager young pilot. Now, in April 1882, he rounded up his publisher, James R. Osgood, and a young Hartford stenographer, Roswell H. Phelps, and set out for a tour of the Mississippi that would allow him to elaborate those earlier articles into a full‑length volume, Life on the Mississippi, that would fuse travel reportage with the earlier memoir. He had long fantasized about, but also long postponed, this momentous return to the river. "But when I come to write the Mississippi book," he promised his wife, Livy, "then look out! I will spend 2 months on the river & take notes, & I bet you I will make a standard work."
Twain mapped out an ambitious six‑week odyssey, heading first down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, then retracing his steps as far north as St. Paul, Minnesota, stopping en route at Hannibal. The three men sped west by the Pennsylvania Railroad in a "joggling train," the very mode of transportation that already threatened the demise of the freewheeling steamboat culture Twain had treasured. By journeying from east to west, he reversed the dominant trajectory of his life, enabling him to appraise his midwestern roots with fresh eyes. "All the R.R. station loafers west of Pittsburgh carry both hands in their pockets," he observed. "Further east one hand is sometimes out of doors." Now accustomed to the genteel affluence of Hartford, Connecticut, where he had resided for a decade, he had grown painfully aware of the provinciality of his boyhood haunts. "The grace and picturesqueness of female dress seem to disappear as one travels west away from N. York."
To secure candid glimpses of his old Mississippi world, Twain traveled under the incognito of "Mr. Samuel," but he underestimated his own renown. From St. Louis he informed Livy that he "got to meeting too many people who knew me. We swore them to secrecy, & left by the first boat." After the three travelers boarded the steamer Gold Dust—"a vile, rusty old steamboat"—Twain was spotted by an old shipmate, his alias blown again. Henceforth his celebrity, which clung to him everywhere, would transform the atmosphere he sought to recapture. For all his joy at being afloat, he carped at the ship's squalor, noting passageways "less than 2 inches deep in dirt" and spittoons "not particularly clean." He dispatched the vessel with a sarcasm: "This boat built by [Robert] Fulton; has not been repaired since." At many piers he noted that whereas steamers in his booming days had been wedged together "like sardines in a box," a paucity of boats now sat loosely strung along empty docks.
Twain was saddened by the backward towns they passed, often mere collections of "tumble‑down frame houses unpainted, looking dilapidated" or "a miserable cabin or two standing in [a] small opening on the gray and grassless banks of the river." No less noticeable was how the river had reshaped a landscape he had once strenuously committed to memory. Hamlets that had fronted the river now stood landlocked, and when the boat stopped at a "God forsaken rocky point," disgorging passengers for an inland town, Twain stared mystified. "I couldn't remember that town; couldn't place it; couldn't call its name . . . couldn't imagine what the damned place might be." He guessed, correctly, that it was Ste. Genevieve, a onetime Missouri river town that in bygone days had stood "on high ground, handsomely situated," but had now been relocated by the river to a "town out in the country."
Once Twain's identity was known—his voice and face, his nervous habit of running his hand through his hair, gave the game away—the pilots embraced this prodigal son as an honored member of their guild. In the ultimate compliment, they gave him the freedom to guide the ship alone—a dreamlike consummation. "Livy darling, I am in solitary possession of the pilot house of the steamer Gold Dust, with the familiar wheel & compass & bell ropes around me . . . I'm all alone, now (the pilot whose watch it is, told me to make myself entirely at home, & I'm doing it)." He seemed to expand in the solitary splendor of the wheelhouse and drank in the river's beauty. "It is a magnificent day, & the hills & levels are masses of shining green, with here & there a white‑blossoming tree. I love you, sweetheart."
Always a hypercritical personality, prone to disappointment, Mark Twain often felt exasperated in everyday life. By contrast, the return to the pilot house cast a wondrous spell on him, retrieving precious moments of his past when he was still young and unencumbered by troubles. The river had altered many things beyond recognition. "Yet as unfamiliar as all the aspects have been to‑day," he recorded in his copious notes, "I have felt as much at home and as much in my proper place in the pilot house as if I had never been out of the pilot house." It was a pilot named Lem Gray who had allowed Twain to steer the ship himself. Lem "would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care‑free as I had been twenty years before." One morning he arose at 4 a.m. to watch "the day steal gradually upon this vast silent world . . . the marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections that followed, were bewitching to see." The paradox of Twain's life was that the older and more famous he became and the grander his horizons, the more he pined for the vanished paradise of his early years. His youth would remain the magical touchstone of his life, his memories preserved in amber.
An excerpt from "Mark Twain," published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Ron Chernow. Reproduced with permission.
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