Clever the Twain Shall Meet

In March, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts bestowed its annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on the former late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien. At the awards ceremony, there was a frisson of tension in the audience. Just one month earlier, President Donald Trump had attacked the center’s programming as too “woke,” dismissed its leadership, and installed himself as chairman of the board, sparking widespread protest in the arts community.  

On the Kennedy Center’s stage, many of the comedians roasting O’Brien also took aim at the president. But O’Brien, who has built his reputation as a nonpartisan observer, seemingly kept his powder dry. Instead, he spoke of the legacy of Mark Twain and the profound honor of receiving the award.  

“Don’t be distracted by the white suit and the cigar and the riverboat,” O’Brien chided. “Twain is alive, vibrant, and vitally relevant today.” He spoke of Twain’s hatred of bullies, his support for underdogs ranging from the formerly enslaved to Chinese immigrants—“he punched up, not down”—along with his hatred of intolerance, racism, and anti-Semitism, and his suspicion of populism and jingoism. Though O’Brien never mentioned Trump, the audience slowly awakened to the comedian’s subversive subtext. He concluded to sustained applause, “Twain wrote, ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it.’” 

And thus with just a few spare sentences, Conan O’Brien made Mark Twain—the mustachioed, wisecracking author of America’s Gilded Age—once again relevant to American politics.  

So closely did O’Brien echo the praise of the writer’s “core principles” and irreverent wit that I wondered if someone had slipped him the advance galleys of Ron Chernow’s sparkling new biography. In Mark Twain, the acclaimed biographer takes a sledgehammer to the mythology of the quintessential American author. Like O’Brien, Chernow challenges the “sanitized view of a humorous man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye,” to demonstrate that Twain was among our nation’s most trenchant and biting social critics. Chernow asserts that “far from being a soft-shoe, cracker-barrel philosopher, he was a waspish man of decided opinions delivering hard and uncomfortable truths. His wit was laced with vinegar, not oil.”  

In his personal life, too, Twain belied his deliberately crafted, jovial public persona. Chernow wryly notes, “Mark Twain could serve as both a social critic of something and an exemplar of the very thing he criticized.” Indeed, the author who charmed audiences with his folksy demeanor and sought to create “a new democratic literature for ordinary people” while skewering elites and their institutions was exceptionally well read and cosmopolitan. He had lived for more than a decade in Europe, residing in grand châteaus and villas, and traveled the world, crossing the Atlantic 29 times. Twain’s barefoot boyhood on the banks of the Mississippi River was the stuff of legend, but the author spent most of his adulthood in New England, in a 25-room mansion with a fleet of servants, purchased with cash from his wealthy wife.  

Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning writer of popular biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, tackles his complicated, often contradictory subject with nuance and prolific research. Chernow explores the author’s enormous oeuvre—a gratifying surprise for those whose familiarity with Twain resides in hazy middle school memories of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  

But this is no literary critique. Chernow asserts that Twain was “the most original character in American history,” and he is fascinated by him more as a man than as an author, reveling in his theatricality, both on the stage and off. He writes,  

Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being, living a cloistered existence, and thrust himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heartland. Probably no other American author has led such an eventful life.  

Mark Twain is a massive brick of a book, comprising more than a thousand pages, and it is the mining of Twain’s private life and its intertwining with his public image that lends the book its physical heft and its most surprising and compelling content. Chernow concludes that “Mark Twain’s foremost creation—his richest and most complex gift to posterity—may well have been his own inimitable personality, the largest literary personality that America has produced.” 

Twain was easily the most famous writer in Gilded Age America, an era whose name was coined by Twain himself. He was the nation’s first celebrity author, a consummate storyteller, the nation’s most quoted person, and for many outside the U.S., the archetypal American. He mastered a vast array of literary formats, including travelogues, novels, essays, political tracts, plays, and historical romances. He created a uniquely American voice that captured the vernacular speech of the young nation. As famous an orator as a writer, Twain elevated storytelling into a wholly original theatrical genre, conducting speaking tours that attracted massive crowds and took him around the world, from Hawaii to Australia.  

Despite his myriad achievements, Twain felt unappreciated by the literary establishment, and chafed at the label “humorist,” fearing that audiences saw him as little more than vaudevillian. In 1907, Oxford University presented him with an honorary degree. For a man of humble origins who had left school at 12, Twain considered the diploma the pinnacle of his career, and he proudly donned the resplendent scarlet graduation gown to wear at formal events for the remainder of his life—including, charmingly, his daughter’s wedding. 

The broad outlines of Twain’s formative years are generally well known. Born Samuel Clemens to a downwardly mobile, slave-owning family in 1835, he was raised in the bustling river town of Hannibal, Missouri. It was a nostalgic setting the author returned to time and again in his writing, but rarely in person. Following his father’s death in 1847, Clemens went to work as a printer’s apprentice, and later, as a riverboat pilot, a job that fed his appetite for adventure and provided an endless stream of amusing anecdotes harvested for literary purposes. Clemens essentially sat out the Civil War—after a two-week stint as a Confederate soldier, he fled to the Nevada Territory, where he launched his writing career at the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper catering to silver miners more interested in entertainment than reporting, and, as Chernow writes, “an ideal home for someone with Sam’s outsize powers of invention and casual relationship with facts.”  

In Nevada, Clemens adopted the nom de plume “Mark Twain,” a wink at his stint as a river pilot: On the Mississippi, a leadsman would yell out “mark twain!” upon lowering a weighted rope measuring 12 feet, to ascertain depth for safe passage. Twain’s comical sketches of the Far West and accounts of his journey established him as a travel writer. The Innocents Abroad, a humorous and irreverent travelogue of a five-month organized excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, became Twain’s best-selling book during his lifetime.  

Today, of course, Twain is revered as an iconic American novelist, whose books Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are literary mainstays. Yet in his own time, these novels received mixed critical responses, with some reviewers troubled by the groundbreaking use of vernacular speech and questionable immorality. (Little Women’s Louisa May Alcott scolded, “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”) Twain was so discouraged by the modest sales and lukewarm reaction to Tom Sawyer that he briefly swore off writing fiction. While modern readers might assume that these works constituted the apex of Twain’s career, Chernow covers their publication in the first third of his book, leaving the bulk of the biography to discuss Twain’s lesser-known writings, and his personal dramas. 

Twain reached the peak of his celebrity long after his fiction career had largely ended. A master of self-promotion, Twain tightly controlled the marketing of his books and lent his name and likeness to cigars, whiskey, and shirt collars. He created his own brand identity, with his shock of white hair, moustache, and signature white suits—he purportedly owned 14—and delighted in public recognition. For his massive speaking tours, he printed his own witty signage, with a trademark kicker that read, “Doors open at 7 o’clock[.] The trouble to begin at 8 o’clock.”  

Twain was his own best character. He sought the spotlight, and relished interactions with the press and the public. On the road, he held court with a gaggle of reporters from his hotel bed, clad in a nightshirt while puffing on a cigar. (He reportedly smoked 40 cigars a day and quipped, “It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.”) To his family’s mortification, the flamboyant Twain ofttimes created a spectacle. Once while in London, Twain strolled from his hotel to a public bath club in a state of undress, attracting a throng of spectators, including the press corps. After reading the London Times’ coverage, one of Twain’s daughters cabled from Connecticut, scolding, “Much worried remember proprieties.” 

Twain’s literary reputation rested on his masterful ability to mask deeper messages with a light veneer. The British playwright George Bernard Shaw riffed that Twain “has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.” Like Twain’s most beloved characters, the author himself often portrayed this same duality—a humorous facade that disguised a darker, more introspective core. It is at this crossroads—the intersection of Twain’s lighthearted persona and the darker underbelly—that the biography is most engaging.  

Despite his jovial front, Twain could be mercurial, petulant, and demanding. He had an explosive temper and was notoriously vindictive, holding grudges for decades. He was litigious, filing lawsuits against anyone he believed had crossed him, including his publisher, business associates, and family members. Twain filed three lawsuits, two civil and one criminal, against a woman he dubbed “the reptile”—the titled landlady of his 60-room rented Italian villa. After a farcical series of events involving leaking sewage, severed telephone lines, and a rabid donkey, Twain smirked, “I was losing my belief in hell until I got acquainted with the Countess Massiglia.”   

Haunted by his financially precarious childhood, Twain was a compulsive speculator, relentlessly chasing get-rich schemes, and with dismal results. He was fascinated by technology, and dreamed up endless inventions, including a bed clamp to prevent kicking off blankets, and a self-pasting scrapbook. He lost a fortune—nearly $6 million in today’s money—investing in a failed typesetting machine. Certain that his publisher was cheating him, Twain founded a rival publishing house, and managed it into bankruptcy. The heavy weight of debt hung over the Clemens family for decades, pushing them into European exile in the belief that it would be cheaper to maintain a household on the continent than in Connecticut, and forcing Twain to accept creatively unsatisfying but lucrative writing and speaking gigs. He was such a notoriously awful businessman that The Washington Post opined, “One good way to locate an unsafe investment is to find out whether Mark Twain has been permitted to get in on the ground floor.” 

Twain’s private life, too, was more complex than it appeared. Twain was a fiercely devoted husband to his wife, Livy, who served as both personal and professional partner. There was not, Chernow notes, “the least hint of scandal” in their marriage. Yet after her death, Twain pursued cringey friendships with dozens of adolescent girls he termed his “angelfish.” While Chernow stipulates that there is no evidence of sexual impropriety, the biographer openly struggles with reconciling these relationships, which involved young girls visiting the lonely widower for a week at a time, often unchaperoned. In Twain’s later years, letters exchanged with the angelfish comprised fully half of the esteemed author’s correspondence.  

Twain was a doting father to his three daughters when they were young, but grew stern and overprotective as they matured, reluctant to allow them to marry and have independent lives of their own. Later, as he pursued his angelfish, he became neglectful of his daughters’ escalating needs.  

Angelfish aside, the Clemens women deserve their own biography. Livy was an heiress to a coal fortune; Twain squandered much of her inheritance on poor investments. An invalid for much of her married life, Livy was periodically forbidden by her doctor from seeing Twain in person (but not other household members) because his manner was “too excitable” and thought to precipitate her heart palpitations. Banished from the bedroom, Twain slipped love notes to his wife throughout the day. As for the Clemens daughters, Twain plucked his eldest, Susy, from Bryn Mawr after her freshman year, likely in response to a romantic entanglement with a female classmate; she later died of meningitis after refusing conventional medical care, at her father’s direction. The two younger daughters, Clara and Jean—the youngest suffering with epilepsy—spent years of their life in sanatoriums, receiving “rest cures” that limited intellectual stimulation and contact with the outside world. Twain’s devoted, besotted secretary Isabel Lyon also occupied the dysfunctional familial orbit. Her own mental health travails, her fraught relationship with the Clemens daughters, her intimate (albeit asexual) codependence with the widowed Twain, and her ultimate betrayal of the author form a major subplot in the final third of the biography. 

Most readers will naturally be drawn to Chernow’s narratives of Twain’s writerly life, as he seeks connections between the author’s personal views and his large body of work. Mark Twain is not scholarly literary analysis, but there’s plenty of discussion of the author’s most familiar texts as well as dozens of lesser-known and unpublished writings to satisfy most.  

Chernow is particularly interested in tracing Twain’s growth in racial tolerance from the raw bigotry of his youth (in New York City for the first time, he was struck by the “mass of human vermin”), to his bold critique of slavery in Huckleberry Finn, to his vocal defense of Black, Jewish, and Indigenous people in his later career (even as he used vocabulary and stereotypical tropes that trouble the modern ear). Serendipitously, Chernow’s Mark Twain hit bookshelves the same week that James, Percival Everett’s revisionist take on Huckleberry Finn—retold from the perspective of Jim, an escaped enslaved man—won the Pulitzer Prize. For a current-day reader, when compared side by side, James is electrifying and Huckleberry Finn feels dated. Chernow acknowledges the challenges of reading not just Huckleberry Finn but also much of Twain’s writing with a 21st-century sensibility, even as he reminds readers of how radical Twain was for his time, and the ways in which his literature can inform our understanding of the past.  

In addition to race, Twain was remarkably progressive on a range of political issues—he was an early advocate for women’s suffrage, and spoke out against anti-Semitism, municipal corruption, and colonialism. But he also pulled his punches, ever conscious of the fine line he walked as a southerner-turned-Yankee confidant (and publisher) of former Union generals in post–Civil War America. While he boldly confronted slavery’s evils in Huckleberry Finn, he “shamefully ducked” the contemporary concerns of its aftermath, including Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Fervently opposed to lynching, Twain began work on an entire book on the subject, but ultimately abandoned the project, concluding, “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left, down there [the South], after it issued from the press.”  

As he grew older, and with his reputation secured, Twain felt emboldened to opine on current affairs. His interests were eclectic, ranging from alternative medicine to Philippine independence, and they provide us with a particular sight line on a moment in American history when the nation was moving from the travails of Reconstruction into the explosive growth of industrialization and nationalism. Twain had always evinced a harsh and bitter critique of society and its institutions in his fiction, but in his later years his work grew darker, drifting from humor and fiction toward essays lacking the softening mask of humor. He turned his pen against missionaries, Russian czars, the Catholic Church, and, particularly, imperialism. Not everyone was pleased. In response to Twain’s calls for the American withdrawal from the Philippines, Teddy Roosevelt called him a “prize idiot,” and The New York Times scolded Twain for “disregarding the grin of the funny man for the sour visage of the austere moralist.”   

More than a century after his death, Twain remains a mainstay of the literary canon, even as fewer of his books remain in circulation, and his most famous works are banned from many secondary schools. But Chernow is persuasive in his argument that even in his own lifetime, Twain was a larger-than-life character, “embodying something more than a great writer, that he had come to personify, at home and abroad, the country that had spawned him of which he stood as such a unique specimen.” 

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