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.
