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San Francisco Chronicle
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump's tactic to ‘flood the zone' is now threatening Mark Twain's legacy
When you enter the offices of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at UC Berkeley, you'll see portraits and photographs of the revered writer and humorist hanging on the walls. A few tchotchkes of dubious taste, like a porcelain bust with a head of his greying hair, are scattered around — all part of the largest repository of Twain materials in the world. Brought to UC Berkeley in 1949, the project's primary purpose isn't collecting fun souvenirs; it houses everything major that Twain wrote and furthers scholarly interpretations of his work. The suite of offices on the fourth floor of the Bancroft Library holds numerous editions of his 30 published books, more than 11,000 letters he and his family wrote, 17,000 letters written to him, as well as 600 unpublished manuscripts, business documents, scrapbooks, bills and photographs. Hundreds of scholars have used the collection to inform their books, documentaries and other works. 'The Mark Twain Papers ranks as one of the foremost scholarly achievements of our era,' Ron Chernow, who relied on the papers to prepare his recently published biography of Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, wrote in his acknowledgements. The project is so significant that the federal government has funded it for the past 58 years. In doing so, it helped editors decipher and organize the 5,000 pages Twain left as an autobiography and publish it, as Twain requested, 100 years after his death. The 2010 book became a New York Times bestseller. Even President Donald Trump admires Twain. He wants a statue of the author to be included in his proposed, yet unfunded, 'National Garden of American Heroes,' which would open to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But in April, the National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded a $450,000 grant to the Mark Twain Papers and Project, undermining its ability to continue. It was part of the cost-cutting effort of the Department of Government Efficiency, an organization not established by government statute and led until recently by Elon Musk. Two young men from DOGE, one who dropped out of college, commandeered the offices of the NEH in early April and unilaterally decided, without consulting any of the experts inside the agency, to cancel 1,500 grants, according to a lawsuit filed by three major scholarly organizations looking to claw back the canceled funds. Days later, the two men let go of 85% of the NEH's 180-person staff. 'NEH has cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice, as well as awards that may not inspire public confidence in the use of taxpayer funds,' the agency explained in an April 24 press release. In the swirl of outrage surrounding the Trump administration's various actions, cancellation of the Twain grant has not drawn any attention — no news reports, no public announcements or cries of anger. That it has almost been unnoticed reflects the precarious times in which we live. The University of California has been tempered in its reaction. It has joined two lawsuits, but Rich Lyons, the UC Berkeley chancellor, and UC President Michael Drake have only spoken about the Trump cuts in concerned but not outraged terms. The university and the rest of the UC system appear to be avoiding the limelight, probably to avoid Trump's wrath. They don't want to be targeted like Harvard. Outrage fatigue has also settled in. The Trump administration has rescinded funds to the Lawrence Hall of Science, San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, Transit Books and SFJazz, among many others. It has yanked funding from major research centers, forcing labs doing critical research to scramble to survive. The Trump administration has fired weather experts and downsized Social Security offices. Students have been abducted off the street. So, what is one more cut to another revered institution? It matters, not just because it damages the study of Mark Twain, whose biting political commentary would help us weather these dark days. ('Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,' Twain famously said.) It matters because it is part of a strategy, stated by Trump ally and political strategist Steve Bannon, to 'flood the zone' and overwhelm dissenters. By deluging citizens with the pace of his destructive acts, Trump has created a sense of paralysis. How do you know what to protest when there are so many things to be angry about? There is a call for mass demonstrations on June 14, Trump's 79th birthday and the date he has set for a $45 million military parade in Washington. I plan to participate in the protests because I want Trump to know the United States is a better place when we support the arts and sciences and lift people rather than denouncing broad sectors of our society and callously deporting people without due process. In the meantime, the Bancroft Library is appealing NEH's decision to slash Mark Twain funding. 'Without that funding, the project won't be able to continue beyond the calendar year,' said Kate Donovan, director of the Bancroft Library. Even though it is an effort, we must resist the urge to collapse from exhaustion. We must fight back against every grant lost, every lab shuttered.
Washington Post
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
What to read this summer
Summer is the perfect time to dive into a new book, and the Post's Book World section has compiled recommendations for every type of reader. Today, Book World editors Jacob Brogan and John Williams talk to host Elahe Izadi about the new releases and old titles they suggest digging into this summer. Here's the list of books mentioned in today's episode: 'The Death and Life of August Sweeney' by Samuel Ashworth 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens 'Mark Twain' by Ron Chernow 'Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America' by Sam Tanenhaus 'Is a River Alive?' by Robert MacFarlane 'King of Ashes' by S.A. Cosby 'Spent' by Alison Bechdel 'Crush' by Ada Calhoun 'The Book of Records' by Madeleine Thien 'The Dry Season' by Melissa Febos 'Sloppy' by Rax King 'Flashlight' by Susan Choi 'Second Life' by Amanda Hess 'Mood Machine' by Liz Pelly Today's show was produced by Emma Talkoff, with help from Lucas Trevor. It was edited by Ariel Plotnick, and mixed by Sean Carter. Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
New York Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What Ron Chernow Loves About Mark Twain
The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in 'Mark Twain,' Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century's biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image. On this week's episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject. 'The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,' Chernow says. But at the same time, 'I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America's small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.' We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Washington Post
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
What we get wrong about Mark Twain
It's said that when 'War and Peace' was finished and about to be published, Tolstoy looked at the huge book and suddenly exclaimed, 'The yacht race! I forgot to put in the yacht race!' At 1,174 pages, Ron Chernow's 'Mark Twain' is essentially the same length as 'War and Peace,' but seemingly nothing has been overlooked or left out. Normally, this would be a signal weakness in a biography — shape and form do matter — but Chernow writes with such ease and clarity that even long sections on, say, Twain's business ventures prove horribly fascinating as the would-be tycoon descends, with Sophoclean inexorability, into financial collapse and bankruptcy.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn't Have Much of What Made Him Great
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.
