Mark Twain

When a new biography of Mark Twain is issued, or even rumored, a common question that arises is: What more could biographer × possibly tell us that we don’t already know? To be sure, library shelves are weighted down with more than forty Mark Twain biographies, some dissecting portions of his life and a few notable ones, such as Justin Kaplan’s, Ron Powers’s, and Gary Scharnhorst’s (three volumes), that examine the full scope of the complex life. And these exclude Twain’s own extensive autobiographical writings. Ron Chernow’s volume ranks with the full-life group.No latecomer to the genre, Chernow has written seven highly respected biographies, including the National Book Award–winning The House of Morgan, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington, and best-sellers Alexander Hamilton, Grant, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and The Warburgs. As in those acclaimed titles, Chernow’s work on Mark Twain is founded on exhaustive research. A scan of the seventy-five pages of notes shows that the bulk of the source materials are primary documents, such as Twain’s notebooks and letters, as well as letters from his many correspondents—family members, personal friends, professional associates, and complete strangers seeking favors such as personal endorsements or financial support. Chernow has given us as complete a picture as may be possible.Weighing in at more than 1,033 pages of narrative, Chernow’s biography is longer than all other recent Twain biographies with the exception of Scharnhorst’s. Of the five parts in Chernow’s account, the first covers the Clemens family history and Sam’s early life up to the first year of Sam and Livy’s marriage; part two examines the twenty-year period of Mark Twain’s greatest productivity up until the family’s move to Europe in 1891. In part three, the focus is on the many residences in various European locales, anxieties about finances and the details of unwinding his bankruptcy, the world lecture tour undertaken to defray his final debts, and his return to the United States in 1897 to attend to daughter Susy’s fatal illness. Part four details the period of family grief over Susy’s death, moves among several semipermanent residences (including a year in Florence, Italy, in 1904 where Livy died), and the ongoing struggle of finding treatment for daughter Jean’s epilepsy. Part five covers Mark Twain’s last years, including the construction of his final home, Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut; his plans for his legacy; his perilous vulnerability to the predatory designs of his companion and household manager Isabel Lyon and his business manager Ralph Ashcroft, who married Lyon in an unusual arrangement seemingly struck to shield them from testifying against each other; Jean’s tragic death on Christmas eve of 1909; and the outpouring of national mourning upon the death of Mark Twain four months later.At least one reviewer in a national publication has objected to aspects of Chernow’s approach, in particular the proportions of the book. Contending that the early period of a life is crucial to understanding the formative influences on the trajectory of a life, this critic complained that Chernow has missed the mark by offering less of the early life and much more of the later Mark Twain. This criticism is, I think, off-target for a couple of reasons. First, there is simply much less material in the early period on which to draw reliably; a more expansive account of this segment of the life would need to rely more on speculation rather than on fact. Second, and more importantly, a recurrent theme in Chernow’s account is that the man and the writer that Mark Twain became diverged rather strikingly from the antebellum influences of his youth. Thus, his childhood tells us little of the mature man except to provide a yardstick by which to measure his growth, especially with respect to race.Still, Chernow is careful to note that Twain’s evolved consciousness about racial injustice was neither total nor constant, acknowledging that vestiges of prejudice can be found well into his later years. And still, the gap between his acceptance of slavery and white superiority in his youth to the mature recognition that the disadvantages endured by Blacks were primarily the responsibility of white society traces an exceptional trajectory. And much of this is the result of not remaining in the confines of Hannibal. A significant influence in Mark Twain’s evolution is his marriage to Livy Langdon, daughter of a progressive family who were actively involved in abolition.Moreover, as important as the issue of race was in the evolution of Mark Twain and in the life of the nation, Chernow’s biography details the remarkable ambit of his life, a journey that began in a small Mississippi River town but covered almost the entire globe. His expansive travels provide the evidence of lived experience to his poignant claim: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” He learned this lesson early on, and it was reinforced throughout his peripatetic life. In his sixties, his world lecture tour to relieve him of the burdens of bankruptcy, and which yielded Following the Equator, prompted his sharp critique of the colonial enterprise. This carried over into his rebuke of the U.S. role in Cuba and especially the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. This is evidence that as Mark Twain aged, his engagement and his influence grew. This is one reason why the sections of Chernow’s biography successively cover a shorter number of years, reflecting the increasing complexity of his life as it unfolded.So, what’s new in this latest biography? Although much of the territory has been covered by biographical predecessors, what distinguishes Chernow’s book is his development of the many contexts that provide readers an informative backdrop for many of the developments in Mark Twain’s life. For example, many biographies offer accounts of the Clemens family tensions, but Chernow notes how Sam became somewhat neglectful of them; although he offered financial support of his mother and to a lesser degree his brother Orion, long years elapsed between personal visits. And Sam’s well-known frustrations with Orion are more fully understood in light of details about many of Orion’s challenges, professional, psychological, and cognitive as he aged. The matriarch, Jane Clemens, also suffered from dementia in her later years, which weighed on Sam’s own mind into his seniority. Chernow also amplifies the many illnesses that plagued Sam, his wife Livy, and their daughters. Susy’s death from meningitis and Jean’s epilepsy are noted in every biography, but again Chernow provides a much fuller picture of the ravages of illness that afflicted the family in the era prior to modern medicine and their rather desperate efforts to find relief.Beyond the circle of family life, larger contexts play an important role in Chernow’s portrait of Twain’s very complex life. These include the economic upheavals of the 1873 and 1893 Panics. No doubt Chernow’s earlier research on financial figures such as Morgan, Rockefeller, and the Warburgs alerted him to nineteenth-century economic conditions to which Mark Twain literary and business activities, and his family’s security, were also subject. And the book’s coverage of his propensity to invest in numerous eccentric schemes is one of the more thorough explanations that I’ve read. Finally, the political contexts both within the United States and in Europe, where he witnessed the last gasps of monarchical power during his residency in the last decade of the nineteenth century, provide a detailed setting for the life of a man fully immersed in national and world affairs, and not simply a reclusive storyteller spinning yarns for readers fond of nostalgic tales of a simpler time.No doubt readers will find instances of Chernow’s account that they may question. For me, one instance is his iteration from an earlier biography of Sam Clemens’s relationship with his father: “My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak” (13). This quotation appears in Dixon Wecter’s Sam Clemens of Hannibal (1952, p. 67 [not 34, as Chernow notes]). However, this claim originally comes from an 1870 sketch titled “A Memory” and is spoken by the unnamed narrator whose specific mention of his half-brother Orrin Johnson makes clear that it is not the assertion of Mark Twain. Could this be based on Sam’s own relationship with the strict John Marshall Clemens? Possibly yes, but it is a fictional character’s recollection not a direct report of Mark Twain. This slight miss on Chernow’s part, however, is an extremely minor infraction; fortunately, the majority of his account draws on primary sources rather than earlier biographies, making this a rare exception to an otherwise meticulously researched book.Of course, an excellent biography must not only be founded on sound research but also be conscientiously developed and eloquently written. And to his credit, Chernow is a very effective writer. He has given us a compelling narrative written in graceful prose that seamlessly includes the distinctive voice of America’s most identifiable writer. And when carrying the narrative in his own voice, Chernow is up to the task, as in this late passage:Chernow’s Mark Twain earns its place alongside earlier well-respected biographies. I warmly recommend it to the community of Mark Twain scholars.