09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Mark Twain' Review: The Most American Writer
More than a century after his death, Mark Twain remains one of the most recognizable voices in American literature—the author of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876), 'Life on the Mississippi' (1883) and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1884), the latter among the most consequential novels ever written in English and possibly (if you believe Ernest Hemingway) the source of American literature itself.
That may be an exaggeration, but almost everything about Twain seems exaggerated as well as true. In his disapproval of Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, he called the president 'the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War,' a man 'always hunting for a chance to show off.'
Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 in Florida, Mo., before moving, at the age of 4, to nearby Hannibal—his beloved 'white town drowsing' on the banks of the Mississippi. A roistering, high-spirited boy, he was described by his 'very pretty' neighbor, Laura Hawkins (the model for Becky Thatcher in 'Tom Sawyer'), as a barefoot lad who 'came out of his home, opposite mine, and started showing off, turning handsprings and cutting capers.' The showing off continued until his death in 1910.
In his biography of the famed satirist, Ron Chernow tracks, with patience and care, Twain's journey over nearly eight tumultuous decades. Mr. Chernow's tale is enlivened by blazing quotes from Twain's prodigious interviews, diaries and letters. This literary bounty, of course, poses a problem for all Twain biographers, from his rambling but indispensable first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine (1912), through Van Wyck Brooks (1920), Justin Kaplan (1966) and Ron Powers (2005), among many others. The quotes tend to burn a hole in the page, and it's difficult for a biographer to recover. Mr. Chernow, whose lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant are revered for their sound scholarship, clear writing and strong narrative drive, weaves Twain's sizzling remarks almost seamlessly into his own narrative.
