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The following review appeared 26 June 2025 on the Mark Twain Forum.
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This could have been a very short review of a very long book. OK, this sounds ominous, but isn't. The shorter the review, the sooner Twainians can sit down and enjoy a very good biography indeed. This could also have been a very long review. Reviewers of biographies are often lured into padding their reviews with a biography of their own, which can be useful for the general reader unfamiliar with the person being biographed, but subscribers to the Mark Twain Forum don't need a refresher course on Mark Twain's life.
Ron Chernow's Mark Twain has been widely reviewed in the media, so this review will touch on some of those other reviews. Previous reviews of this hefty biography (it weighs in at just under four pounds, and is 1,174 pages) have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Hartford Courant, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and the list goes on. Nearly all have begun by naming every tall ship in Chernow's impressive fleet of biographies: George Washington, J. P. Morgan, Ulysses S Grant, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton. Nearly all of them mention that his biography of Hamilton was the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit Broadway musical. There is a good reason for surveying Chernow's impressive biographies, even if some reviewers have not bothered explaining exactly why this matters. It matters because biographers tend to write the best biographies, and Ron Chernow, whose many awards include a Pulitzer Prize and a Gold Medal for Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, may be the best biographer living today.
Certainly, the best biographies of Mark Twain have been written by experienced biographers, beginning with Albert Bigelow Paine's own hefty triple-decker. Yes, it was as much a hagiography as a biography, and Paine relied too much on Twain himself for facts--flaws that this reviewer and others have pointed out many times--but without Paine's eye-witness narrative all subsequent Twain biographers would have been severely challenged. It's important to remember that Twain chose Paine as his biographer precisely because Twain was impressed by Paine's biography of Thomas Nast, and recognized the value of employing an experienced biographer. Three other experienced biographers who have written about Twain with notable success include Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 1966), Ron Powers (Dangerous Waters, 1999, and Mark Twain, A Life, 2005) and Michael Shelden (Mark Twain: Man in White, 2010). In later life Paine was a member of the Pulitzer Prize committee, Justin Kaplan won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Twain, Powers' many awards for his various writings include a Pulitzer Prize, and Shelden's first book, a biography of George Orwell, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. They are not alone, but they are among the best.
Ranking next after biographers are historians, who, like biographers, understand how to distinguish between fact and explication. When literary critics attempt to write biographies they often come in a distant third. Suffice it to say that Chernow is more experienced than most biographers, and his resulting biography of Twain, Chernow's first literary biography, is a tall ship in full sail, reminiscent of the majestic Begum, of Bengal that shamed a small sloop, the Mary Ann, in an encounter Twain famously immortalized in a 1907 speech as he prepared to sail home--feeling like the Begum, of Bengal himself after receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University. Of course, there have been some very good Twain biographies over the years besides those mentioned above. But there have been many more Twain biographies--some long and some short, some carefully documented, others not, some entertaining and some downright clunky--that more closely resemble that self-important little coastal sloop--"only" the Mary Ann, which carried on board, as her crestfallen skipper admitted, "nothing to speak of." There is no reason to name these less successful biographies here. If we may borrow a metaphor from chapter four of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer--let us draw the curtain of charity on that crowded shelf of tomes.
The reviewers of Chernow's biography who include recitals of Twain's biography often express genuine surprise at the stark contrasts between Mark Twain's public persona and his private existence as Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Some seem as shocked as if they'd read Paine's sweetly abridged hagiography for young readers, The Boy's Life of Mark Twain (1916), and nothing else since. Some of them blame Chernow for being the bearer of the bad news that Twain had a temper, was litigious, was a terrible businessman, could hold a grudge, had strained relationships with his daughters, and other facts long ago entered into evidence, which are old news to Twainians. In fact, most of Chernow's account will seem old news to well-informed Twainians. Although Chernow does not blaze new trails in Twain's biography, he gathers most of the scholarship into one place in a well-organized narrative. Reviewers have also been drawn to the same topics that have attracted the attention of biographers and scholars for decades: Twain's succession of unsuccessful investments, Isabel Lyon's betrayal of her employer's trust, the motivations behind Twain's flirtations with his Angelfish, his evolving racial attitudes, and his profound grief after the loss of his wife Olivia and his eldest daughter, Susy.
Most Twainians have decided for themselves where they stand on these controversial or conflicted areas of Twain's biography, and may find themselves annoyed that Chernow takes the time to present those conflicting views of Twain's life, usually without tipping his hand or firmly taking sides. For Twainians with strong opinions, this sometimes feels like timidity, but general readers will be grateful for the presentation of this information that allows them to make their own informed judgment. Likewise, previous biographers have tended to fall into two camps. In earlier times Twain was too often placed on a pedestal, his greatness unquestioned with no critical examination of his life or writings. In more recent times, there has been a tendency to knock him off that pedestal, perhaps an academic overreaction to those earlier adulatory accounts of his life. Neither approach is correct, of course. Chernow critiques Paine's worshipful approach to his subject and notes how it weakened his portrait of the man. Chernow recognizes the need for balance, and delivers.
He delivers in a readable style that moves the narrative along through each phase of Twain's life. The first ten chapters bring the reader up to the moment when Twain meets the love of his life, Olivia, the day after Christmas in 1867. He was thirty-two and she twenty-two. They would marry in 1870, and the next fifty-nine chapters trace their life together, and Twain's few remaining years without her. Covering nearly half of Twain's life in one-sixth the space devoted to the rest of his life might seem like an imbalanced approach, but when the relative scarcity of surviving evidence of his early life and the abundance of documentation on the crowded events during his life after 1870 are considered, it makes sense. Chernow divides Twain's life into five parts, with appropriate names for each: Afloat, Floodtide, Rapids, Whirlpool, and Shipwreck. Those first ten chapters comprise most of the first part, and the remaining parts are apt descriptions of the shifting currents of Twain's life after 1870. In a May 18, 2025 interview with P. J. Gladnick of Vanity Fair, Chernow said that he deliberately does not "apply modern analytic categories to character, because these are categories that fit our culture but not theirs" and that he "worked very hard at not having modern jargon interfering" with his narrative, both wise choices that are shared by those previously mentioned successful biographies of Twain. Biographers who have chosen otherwise now find themselves huddling behind that curtain of charity.
It can be no surprise that Twain's finances and business ventures get a close look by Chernow's expert eye. After all, there is a distinct theme in Chernow's previous biographies: business and finance. The titles of many of his books make this plain: The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990), The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (1993), The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor (1997), and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998). His biographies of Hamilton (2004), Washington (2010), and Grant (2017) also include their business and financial affairs. Twain's financial problems and business misadventures are scrutinized not because Chernow is obsessed with the financial lives of famous people, but because Twain himself spent so much time distracted by matters of money. Twain also worried about family health issues and his career, but did not always keep his priorities straight. Even if Chernow had never written a single biography that dealt with business or finance, it's an unavoidable and disruptive element of Twain's life. At the end of Chernow's account the reader must be left wondering what Twain's life might have been like if he'd stuck to writing and avoided business entanglements--and what American literature may have lost because he split his attention between the twain.
The reason this biography seems to divide Twain's life into his literary career and his business obsessions is because Twain himself divided his life in exactly this way. The reason this biography spends so much time narrating Twain's time spent dealing with family matters and health issues is because Twain himself spent his time this way. In fact, there was hardly a day in Twain's life when he was not dealing with a sickness in his household, a family matter, a financial problem, a self-imposed business crisis, or a social obligation. Somewhere in this life of a very busy man who never seemed to be at physical or spiritual rest is that man's inner life. Rarely does a biography capture the interior life of its subject, and Twain is as elusive prey as any nineteenth century writer, perhaps even more than most because he was, of course, in reality, Samuel L. Clemens, a man who struggled most of his life to balance his private life with the public persona he created when he donned the mask of "Mark Twain." One reviewer observes that the mass of detail presented by Chernow is at times overwhelming, and may obscure Twain's inner life. That's not an unreasonable observation, but Twain presents a problem to biographers. Unlike many nineteenth century lives that are not well-documented, Twain left behind an overwhelming mass of documentation--his published and unpublished writings, 50 notebooks, an autobiography of more than 2,000 pages, roughly 12,000 letters, thousands of business papers and household receipts, hundreds of photographs, more than a thousand books from his library, hundreds of personal belongings, and even most of the homes where he lived during his life.
Faced with this mass of evidence, Chernow faced a challenge
envied by most biographers. Instead of trying to squeeze in every small shred
of evidence in hopes of bringing his subject into focus, he had to decide
what to leave out. The fact that he could have written a biography twice as
long and not come any closer to capturing Twain's inner life is a testament
to Chernow's wise sifting of the evidence, as well as the complexity of Twain's
life that makes him such elusive prey. Despite these obstacles, Chernow comes
as close as any might hope to painting a portrait of Twain that will remain
in place for years to come. Twain worried about the same things that the rest
of us worry about--family, health, career, finances. It seems to perplex some
reviewers that Twain shared these same concerns as the rest of us. It should
not. The fact that his life itself seemed somehow larger than life should
not be surprising either: He was not only a great writer, but a popular writer;
he was not only a celebrity long before celebrities became commonplace, but
he carried the burden of being a cultural icon during his own lifetime. He
simply could not live small, and didn't. Thanks to Paine, Kaplan, Shelden,
Powers, and now Chernow, Twain, warts and all, is safely back in the hands
of competent biographers, with "course on course of canvas towering into
the sky . . . plowing the great seas," like the Begum, of Bengal,
dominating America's literary horizon.