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"The story of Twain's life is the story of a nation itself, and it has never been told more vividly." Jay Parini
Free Press
September 2005
736 pages
ISBN: 0743248996
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Mark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a
living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted
more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His
awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative
figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavored
the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet somehow, beneath the vast
flowing river of literature that he left behind -- books,
sketches, speeches, not to mention the thousands of letters
to his friends and his remarkable entries in private
journals -- the man who became Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, has receded from view, leaving us with only faint
and often trivialized remnants of his towering personality. In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of thought and
research with a tour de force on the life of our culture's
founding father, re-creating the 19th century's vital
landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human
being at their center. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived,
breathed, and wrote -- drawing heavily on the preserved
viewpoints of the people who knew him best (especially the
great William Dean Howells, his most admiring friend and
literary co-conspirator), and on the annals of the American
19th century that he helped shape. Powers's prose rivals
Mark Twain's own in its blend of humor, telling detail, and
flights of lyricism. With the assistance of the Mark Twain
Project at Berkeley, he has been able to draw on thousands
of letters and notebook entries, many only recently
discovered. It is hard to imagine a life that encompassed more of its
times. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri
for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of
steamboats. He skirted the western theater of the Civil War
before taking off for an uproarious drunken newspaper
career in the Nevada of the Wild West. As his fame as a
humorist and lecturer spread around the country, he took
the East Coast by storm, witnessing the extremes of wealth
and poverty of New York City and the Gilded Age (which he
named). He traveled to Europe on the first American
pleasure cruise and revitalized the prim genre of travel
writing. He wooed and won his lifelong devoted wife, yet
quietly pined for the girl who was his first crush and whom
he would re-encounter many decades later. He invented and
invested in get-rich-quick schemes. He became the toast of
Europe and a celebrity who toured the globe. His comments
on everything he saw, many published here for the first
time, are priceless. The man who emerges in Powers's brilliant telling is both
the magnetic, acerbic, and hilarious Mark Twain of myth and
a devoted friend, husband, and father; a whirlwind of
optimism and restless energy; and above all, a wide-eared
and wide-eyed observer who absorbed every sight and sound,
and poured it into his characters, plots, jokes,
businesses, and life. Mark Twain left us our greatest
voice. Samuel Clemens left us one of our most full and
American of lives.
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