My Review of Ron Chernow's "Mark Twain"

 American Original

 

He came into this world with Haley’s Comet (1835), and he left this world with Haley’s Comet (1910), and for a time his star shined brighter than the brightest stars in heaven. In his encyclopedic study of Mark Twain’s life, biographer Ron Chernow follows Twain from the backwater town of his birth, Hannibal, Missouri, to his being feted by the crowned heads of Europe.

 

Born Samuel Clemens from a family of modest means, Twain was a troublemaking kid in his hometown. He rises from being a printer’s devil to holding a highly lucrative job as pilot on the Mississippi River. Twain’s life on and near the Mississippi became the backdrop for his most famous works. His piloting job ended with the start of the Civil War and for a fleeting time he serves in the confederate militia. Recall that Missouri was a slave state and Twain was part of the culture.

 

One of my criticisms of Chernow is that he applies 21^st century mores to 19^th century America. He should remember Genesis 6:9 “Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age.” So too was Mark Twain and Chernow traces his evolution from supporting slavery to becoming a supporter of civil rights for women, African Americans, and his opposition to antisemitism.

 

Twain leaves Missouri for Nevada and then California by working as a reporter. His breakout work “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” established his reputation as a humorist and writer and leads him to the lecture circuit where his reputation for exaggeration became widely known and appreciated.

 

From there it is onward and upward. He travels abroad and coins the phrase “Gilded Age,” and as a result of a trip abroad he meets through her brother Olivia Langdon and marries her. Langdon is the heiress to a coal mining fortune and the couple sets up housekeeping in her home in Elmira, New York. It is from there that Twain writes “Tom Sawyer” and later “Huckleberry Finn.” Those two works give him a worldwide reputation and travels and lives abroad for many years using Hartford, Connecticut as his base. Unfortunately, Olivia was never in the best of health and his three daughters all die young.

 

Wherever he traveled Twain was treated as a conquering hero, especially in Germany and England. He meets all of the movers and shakers at home and abroad, including Woodrow Wilson Theodore Roosevelt, Nikolai Tesla, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. His political views evolve from being a Southern Unionist, to being a staunch Republican, to being a “mugwump” reformer and later in life he adopts a strongly anti-imperialist worldview. Despite being critical of Theodore Roosevelt, he enlisted his aid in extending the time period for copyrights for the benefit of his heirs.

 

Chernow goes into great detail about Twain’s failed investments in publishing and a linotype machine. In the 1890’s he actually went bankrupt, but he was rescued by Henry Morgan, a Rockefeller partner in Standard Oil. Although Twain sympathized with the downtrodden, his personal lifestyle took on many of the aspects of the gilded age.

 

My primary criticism of the book is its length.  It is 1196 pages including footnotes; way too long, maybe 200 pages too long. Towards the end it became a slog to read.