Occasionally American genius favors those with little formal education. Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest minds among the nation’s Founders, spent two years at Boston’s Latin School but withdrew at the age of ten, due to lack of funds. After a white mistress tutored and then turned on him, the enslaved Frederick Douglass taught himself, evolving into a brilliant orator and prose stylist. Despite poor grades and a brief stint at Columbia’s program of general studies, Jane Jacobs went on to a singular career as a theorist and acclaimed author; her The Death and Life of American Cities remains a keystone for understanding how urban centers thrive.
Then there’s Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, school drop-out, misfit extraordinaire, and the subject of Ron Chernow’s lavish biography, weighing in at over 1,000 pages. Mark Twain will feel like an old friend to fans of Chernow’s previous books, such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington (which garnered a Pulitzer): meticulous research wrapped in fluent storytelling, an inviting voice, warm and wise. He tends to fall hard for his protagonists, but fortunately the tricksy Twain slips the snares of hagiography.
Early on, Chernow highlights young Sam’s connection to his hometown, nestled amid the meanders of the mighty Mississippi River north of St. Louis. Admitted to the Union as part of the eponymous 1820 Compromise, Missouri was pro-slavery and just one of four border states that never quite carried through on threats of secession. The tensions blazed hot, manifesting in the divided character of its famous son. Sam’s milieu was largely racist; his juvenilia is riddled with slurs. His parents, John Marshall and Jane Clemens, had bounced across the South and Midwest, on the hunt for riches that failed to materialize; Sam’s own dread of poverty and obsession with wealth persisted throughout his life. The marriage was cool: John Marshall was sanctimonious and aloof, a judge whose pot of gold — the proceeds from a plot of land in Tennessee — eluded him. He died at the age of 48. Jane was a savvy widow, though, taking in boarders. Her quick tongue and astute perceptions of human nature would shape the youngest of her surviving children. Sam adored her.
Sam apprenticed in the print trade, under the wing of his older brother, Orion, whose abolitionist airs and weak business acumen annoyed him. This relationship helped to nudge the boy away from ingrained prejudices; in time he learned to respect Orion’s influence. Sam “was a wisecracking kid who never entirely shed that smart-alecky side of his personality,” Chernow opines. “But where the young Sam Clemens could appear heartless in mocking people, the later Mark Twain would display a profound wit suffused with a deeper humanity.” The author’s exploration of the Clemens’ dynamics fuels his opening chapters.
As a teenager Sam was ready to bolt. Chernow charts his trajectory, from his glory days as a riverboat pilot (cut short by the Civil War) to a reporter hustling stories on the Nevada frontier to a boozy run as a freelance journalist in San Francisco. Sometime during the war he adopted his nom de plume. While in California he published his breakthrough “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calabasas County,” a piece he considered “middling,” yet which drew plaudits from New York elites whose approval he craved. After a few months on assignment in Hawai’i (then known by its colonial name, the Sandwich Islands), he embarked on a lucrative gig as a humorist and lecturer, overcoming his stage fright, and evoking the beautiful textures and patterns of speech. He played to packed houses, unique for his pithy take-downs and searing satire.
“It was an auspicious time to launch a side career as a lecturer. The early years after the Civil War saw a flowering of the lecture circuit as towns created lyceums or literary societies to meet the middle-class demand for such diversion,” Chernow observes. “For speakers, it was an easy way to promote causes, sell books, and earn good money … With the audience in his palm, his fear vanished altogether and he delivered a ninety-minute presentation on the Sandwich Islands that was so deftly performed as to appear spontaneous. He spoke with a slow, wry drawl and an almost pained expression that made the resulting laughter all the more thunderous … He wouldn’t be a cloistered writer so much as a showman, a public personality, a professional crowd-pleaser. In short, a celebrity.” He recognized a revenue stream when he saw it. The commodification of celebrity would drive the future of our culture; authors who now seek the limelight are following the master’s footsteps.
On the cusp of his fourth decade, he surrendered to an unquenchable wanderlust, parlaying assignments into a Mediterranean cruise (later recast as The Innocents Abroad) and a session amid Washington’s Congress, which served up a feast of figures ripe for his brand of satire. His popularity soared, but he wanted more, gravitating to William Dean Howells, the eminent critic and novelist and sage of the Eastern intellectual establishment. As Chernow notes, “To Howells we owe some of the most trenchant commentary on Twain. As a man strongly committed to social justice, he appreciated this tendency in his friend. ‘The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew … no one has poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter Scottized, pseudochivalry of the Southern Ideal. He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done to the black race in slavery.’ Howells knew Twain’s laughter but also the tragic depths stirring beneath it.”
Twain’s 1869 marriage to the patrician, pious Livy Langdon, a decade his junior, clinched his position at the top of the social ladder, opening up a life of immense fortune. He exalted her above all others, and feigned Christian beliefs to win her hand. He settled into the role of literary squire, at odds with his rough-and-tumble background, permitting him to see our caste system in a fresh light. The scrappy Missouri boy assumed the protective coloring of his affluent in-laws and professional peers. His political views shifted from reactionary to progressive, conforming to values he’d found among New England’s WASPs. Fatherhood soon followed, with the arrival of three daughters: Susy, Clara, and Jean. (A son, Langdon, died of diphtheria before his second birthday.) Twain juggled vocations, editor and publisher as well as wordsmith, while holding forth in his Hartford mansion. And he tapped memories of Hannibal in the creation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which showcased his ear for particular cadences: “From his mother Twain had learned how the plainspoken language of ordinary people can rise to the level of eloquence and he prided himself on his command of vernacular and his ability to render regional dialects precisely,” Chernow writes. “With Huck Finn, he gave voice to the buried portion of the population, the commoners unheard and unseen in the polite, East Coast precincts of Hartford and Boston. He would revolutionize the American novel by scrapping the omniscient, third-person narrator and allowing the unlettered Huck to tell the tale in his own voice, showing how expressive colloquial language could be … The steady flow of Huck’s chatter would mirror the steady flow of the raft coursing down the Mississippi River.”
The biography’s vigorous first half gives way to granular accounts of the Twains’ opulent sojourns in Europe and their increasingly dire mental and physical challenges. Fame brought luxury, yet excessive traveling and emotional turbulence undermined the health of Livy and the girls. Mark Twain recounts episode upon harrowing episode: breakdowns, hospitalizations, betrayals, rages. His sketchy investments triggered additional anxiety, and Chernow doesn’t skimp on the details. His pacing lags but he soldiers on, chronicling the full scope of their tragedies. In the aftermath of Livy’s passing, Twain relied on the service of Isabel Lyon, a kind of shadow-spouse who managed the itinerant household while immersing herself in the family’s dramas.
With the turn of the century, his creative powers dimmed, he basked in the trappings of his legend. It probably kept him sane as his own health declined. Chernow acknowledges his subject’s lurid fascination with teenaged girls, some of whom he met on the lecture circuit, but he tucks the narrative neatly around them, treating them as romanticized yearnings rather than explicit predation. If anything, Mark Twain dials down the writer’s vices, which also included long bouts with alcoholism, his final years mired in an existential regret.
And yet Twain’s vernacular innovations continue to animate our canonical novelists, among them Toni Morrison, Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and even Percival Everett, our new Pulitzer laureate, whose James reimagines Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective, both a salute to and a rebuke of Twain’s legacy. Although Chernow’s biography could have been tighter, it will stand as definitive.
[Published by Penguin Books on May 13, 2025, 1200 pages, $45.00 hardcover]