A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn't Have Much of What Made Him Great

New York Times

13-05-2025

Ron Chernow's new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain's career like a McMansion. Chernow, who has previously written lives of financial titans, war heroes and founding fathers, misses the man William Faulkner called 'the father of American literature' almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain's art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.
Chernow is the author, most famously, of 'Alexander Hamilton' (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation and metamorphosed into the rap musical 'Hamilton,' which became a cultural and commercial juggernaut. Chernow got his start writing books about the Morgans, the Warburgs and other financial dynasties, including a life of John D. Rockefeller, before moving on to even more conspicuous figures such as Hamilton, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. Many of his books have been best sellers, and his biography of Washington won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He is probably, alongside Walter Isaacson, the best-known biographer of his time.
The crucial moments in most biographies tend to arrive early, when a life begins to deviate from those around it — those moments when the future forks, when there's a sheep-versus-goat separation. The biggest mistake Chernow makes is to blow through the vital first third of Twain's life in a fleet 150 or so pages. This period includes the footloose, incident-packed childhood in slave-owning Hannibal, Mo., that informed both 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and his masterpiece, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' It includes the feverish years when Twain was soaking up America's vicissitudes as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, time he funneled into the spooky and incandescent 'Life on the Mississippi.' It includes his journey out West, sometimes prospecting in Nevada, which became 'Roughing It,' and the around-the-world, seat-of-the-pants travels that he reworked into 'The Innocents Abroad.' This is an imposing cargo of experience that Chernow never fully inhabits — it's all over in what seems like a series of postcards.
Twain is married to Olivia Langdon and has settled down by Page 166 of Chernow's book. He is 34 and will live to be 74. Here is when the alert reader, weighing the left and right sides of the elephantine volume in his lap, notices there are still 850 pages to go. How will the author fill them? There is writing to be done and lecture tours to be taken; we seem to go boat by boat and hotel by hotel. There is squabbling with editors and publishers, and the decision to go into publishing himself. There are more lecture tours, and ruinous business adventures — the financial writer in Chernow is more at ease with this material. His Twain is fundamentally a dupe, not a genius. There are cigars to be smoked, a headline-making bankruptcy and more tours. There are the interviews he tended to give while in bed. There is a complicated relationship (apparently not sexual) with the woman who became his aide-de-camp after Olivia's death, health problems and a troubling late-life fixation on tween girls. There is a great deal about the ailments and other woes of his four children, Langdon, Susy, Clara and Jean — the last two especially.
The stories of Twain's children, who either died young or suffered innumerable medical and professional setbacks, are heart-rending and hardly uninteresting. But Chernow goes so deeply into the weeds of their lives, a series of parallel hells, that this book is like a biography of Ronald Reagan that goes all in on Patti and Ron Jr., or a biography of Frank Zappa that gets lost in the life and times of Dweezil and Moon Unit.
This is just one of the ways that Chernow's gift for condensation, unmistakable in earlier books like 'The Death of the Banker' and even the hefty 'Washington,' fails him after the first third of this 1,100-page book. By comparison, Justin Kaplan's penetrating 1966 biography, 'Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain,' which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, came in at a brisk 424 pages. Ron Powers's more recent biography, 'Mark Twain: A Life' (2005), a book that has more ragtime in its soul than Chernow's, wrapped up the life in 722 pages. At the rate we are heading, Twain's next overkill biographer will deliver a page for every day he was on the planet.
Twain — born Samuel Langhorne Clemens — entered this world in Florida, Mo., on Nov. 30, 1835. His family moved to Hannibal, a port town, when he was 4. His father was a mostly unsuccessful lawyer, a downbeat man who also worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster and judge. Twain got his sense of humor from his mother, as well as his poker-faced delivery. He dropped out of school, where he'd learned to hate apple-polishers and phonies, to become a printer's apprentice before drifting into journalism, where he discovered he had a knack for embellishment and hyperbole.
Clemens published his first piece under the byline 'Mark Twain' — a call used on riverboats to indicate a safe depth of water — in 1863, when he was 27. He'd experimented with other pseudonyms, including Rambler, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass and Josh. It's painful to imagine American literature without the ideal name Mark Twain, 'short and melodious — a perfect spondee,' as Chernow points out.
Twain had a striking look from the time he was young. In early photographs, he can resemble Billy the Kid, then Joe Walsh, then early Jimmy Buffett, then Kurt Vonnegut before emerging as the crinkly, shambolic, mustachioed, bushy-browed, white-linen-suit-wearing sage of his later years. There was something about his eyes — an intensity, a shrewdness. One observer commented that they were 'so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me.'
Women found Twain appealing — he seemed to stride out of a billiards-room fantasy — but he lacked confidence with them. 'He was a wild man in every respect except sex,' Chernow writes. His wife, known as Livy, was the sheltered daughter of a coal baron. She didn't have a well-developed sense of humor, but she steadied Twain. She was a strong post to lean against, and theirs was a great love. She worked to civilize him, not always effectively. They evolved a system of codes, so that she could inform him in real time when he was being a bore at a dinner party. She became her husband's first reader and, controversially, bowdlerized a good deal of his prose, excising jokes and what she saw as vulgarities ('breech-clout,' 'stench' and 'retching' included).
The Twain's family's most idyllic years were spent in Hartford, Conn., where they lived in a mansion of their own design that some thought resembled a gingerbread house, a folly. The Twains traveled like plutocrats, in private railroad cars, before financial miscues — notably Twain's deep investments in a novel typesetting machine that flopped — drove them to Europe, where they could live more cheaply, for nearly a decade.
Chernow's book traces what William Dean Howells called Twain's desouthernization. He shed many of the prejudices of his youth and became a stalwart northern liberal — one of the most enlightened men of his time on matters of race, religion, colonialism, suffrage, antisemitism and monarchy. Still, Chernow misjudges and overplays some of this material, arguing, for example, that Twain's impassioned stance (he took a lot of impassioned stances) against America's imperialist adventures in the Philippines is 'no less a part of his legacy than his creation of Tom and Becky, Jim and Huck.' It's a sentence that draws a line under some of this book's problems.
This is the first major biography of Twain to appear after Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Though Twain was progressive for his time — he wrote America's great antislavery novel, befriended Frederick Douglass and put a Black student though Yale, among other things — he could be crude sometimes in his letters, and elsewhere, about Black and Native Americans and Jews. Chernow, to his credit, closely attends to these missteps.
He goes far deeper than previous biographers have into Twain's affection-starved interest in what he called his 'Angelfish' — the young girls who, late in his life, formed a kind of harem around him. He had no grandchildren during his lifetime. Was he simply trying to find an outlet for his grandfatherly feelings? If so, why only girls? 'Young girls innocent & natural — I love 'em same as others love infants,' he wrote.
At the time, no one found Twain's behavior creepy, not even, apparently, the girls' mothers. (A pin he gave to one of the girls turned up not long ago on an episode of 'Antiques Roadshow.') There is no indication that Twain groped or took advantage of any of these girls, but the information, which Chernow lays out like a detective, is disturbing and sobering.
Twain was no special fan of biographies. He said that they are 'but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.' Chernow's biography has clothes and buttons galore but misplaces the man. The whip of Twain's wit is here, but it's laid out like slides in a biology class.
'Any time you mention a river in America you are thinking about the Mississippi,' Bob Dylan writes in his most recent book, 'The Philosophy of Modern Song.' It's largely because of Twain that this is so — he planted a pirate's flag on our literature — but you don't sense that river's, or Twain's, primal currents here. This trip, rather than providing the rush of experience, makes you feel lashed to the mast.