Mark Twain is known for his sense of humor — but he also savored revenge

Los Angeles Times

09-05-2025

Mark Twain was America's first celebrity, a multiplatform entertainer loved and recognized all over the world. Fans from America to Europe to Australia bought his books and flocked to his one-man shows, and his potent doses of humor and hard truth enthralled both the highborn and the humble. After he died, his work lived on through his novels, and his influence has endured — this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, 'James' by Percival Everett, reverses the roles of the main characters in Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' replacing the narration of the teenaged Huck with that of the slave Jim.
Ron Chernow writes books about men of great ambition ranging from President Ulysses S. Grant to financier J.P. Morgan — his biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the long-running Broadway musical — and is an expert chronicler of fame's highs and lows. But in taking on Twain's story, he signed on for a wild ride. Twain was both a brilliant writer who exposed America's hypocrisies with humor and wit, and an angry man who savored revenge, nursed grudges and blamed God for the blows fate rained down on his head. 'What a bottom of fury there is to your fun,' said Twain's friend, the novelist William Dean Howells.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in the slaveholding community of Hannibal, Mo., a town he would immortalize in 'Huckleberry Finn' and its prequel, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.' The restless young man drifted from one job to another, then found his first calling as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, an experience that would inform Twain's 'Life on the Mississippi' and other books. The river gave him his pen name (the phrase 'mark twain' indicated a safe water depth) and inflicted an early blow in the loss of his younger brother: encouraged by Twain, Henry Clemens signed on to a riverboat crew, then died when the boat exploded. Twain blamed himself.
Twain's river idyll ended with the Civil War. Traffic dried up, and to escape conscription into the Confederate Army, Twain headed west with his brother Orion to the Nevada territory. He reveled in the rambunctious disorder of its mining towns, and as a young reporter there he uncorked his ebullient sense of humor. His literary career began in earnest when he moved to San Francisco, and helped by California writers such as Bret Harte, he went national when in 1865 a New York newspaper picked up his story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.' Twain moved east, and his career took off like a rocket.
On a travel junket that inspired his first book, 'Innocents Abroad,' Twain saw a portrait of his future wife, Olivia 'Livy' Langdon. He fell for her image and contrived to meet her, and despite Twain's many eccentricities, her distinguished family accepted him. They married, and their life in Hartford, Conn., padded by Livy's family wealth, was a gracious dream, as the greatest of Twain's age — Grant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Keller — sought his company. But tragedy struck again: their first child, a son, died at 18 months.
The couple had three more children — daughters — and Livy's seemingly bottomless wealth supported him. She edited his manuscripts, ran his household and smoothed his rough edges. But the couple's Achilles' heel was their shared taste for luxury. They routinely lived beyond their means, running up bills even as Twain, a reckless investor with terrible business sense, gambled with both his publishing earnings and her inheritance.
Throughout it all, he kept writing. The most enduring of Twain's books is 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' published Stateside in 1885 when Twain was 49, the story of a runaway boy and an escaped slave who flee down the Mississippi River. A sequel to Twain's comic novel 'Tom Sawyer,' it penetrated the dark heart of Hannibal's savage treatment of Black people. Chernow writes that 'if Tom Sawyer offered a sunlit view of antebellum Hannibal, in 'Huck Finn' Twain delved into the shadows. As he dredged up memories anew, he now perceived a town embroiled in slavery.'
'Huck Finn' was the apotheosis of Twain's gift for truth-telling, as he exposed the sadistic oppression of Black people and made the slave Jim the hero. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the book has been banned for its use of a racial slur, but Chernow makes a strong case for the book's significance, buttressed by 'James' author Everett's summation: 'Anyone who wants to ban Huck Finn hasn't read it.'
Twain's book sales failed to balance the household budget, and the family had to move to Europe to curtail expenses, the beginning of years of exile. Their departure from America was the end of a dream and the beginning of a nightmare. Twain's daughter Susy, who had remained in America, died of bacterial meningitis at age 24. Then Livy died. Her loss unleashed Twain's anger at pitiless fate, and his relationships with his two surviving daughters became increasingly estranged. 'Ah, this odious swindle, human life,' he swore, after his daughter Jean endured a major epileptic seizure.
'In most lives there arrives a mellowing, a lovely autumnal calm that overtakes even the stormiest personalities,' Chernow writes. 'In Twain's case, it was exactly the reverse: his emotions intensified, his indignation at injustice flared ever more hotly, his rage became almost rabid.' He continued to write and make appearances, drawing huge crowds, honing his image as a white-suited, cigar-chomping seer. But he also became self-indulgent and self-isolating, assisted by a poorly paid helper, Isabel Lyon, who took over most aspects of his life, an arrangement that was a prescription for disaster. His main companions were his 'angelfish,' prepubescent girls he arranged to keep company with (Chernow makes a strong case that there was no sexual abuse in this arrangement), but his retreat into a second childhood couldn't shield him from the final, catastrophic family loss that came shortly before his own death.
The downward trajectory of Twain's life shadows his story in elements of Greek tragedy. Twain was a cauldron of creativity and often courage, speaking for Black equality and the suffrage movement, and against anti-Chinese harassment, colonialism and kings. But in his final years, he allowed grief and bitterness to swamp his life, and one wonders at how such a brilliant man could have such little understanding of himself. At 1,200 pages, this is not a book for the casual reader, and Chernow never quite gets to the core of the contradictions in Twain's conflicted soul. But he tells the whole story, in all its glory and sorrow.
'Mark Twain' is a masterful exploration of the magnificent highs and unutterable lows of an American literary genius. Twain himself once said that 'Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.' But this one feels like the truth of one man's star-crossed life.
Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.