It's Amazing
Needing a break from reading about our current (ahem) “situation,” I stopped by Barnes and Noble asking the helpful young staff member if she knew if the new biography of Mark Twain was available. “Heck yeah,” she answered as she led me over to the table piled with copies.
Ron Chernow—of Hamilton fame-has done it again. This work gives the reader the feeling of walking alongside Samuel Clemons for the entirety of his life. This detailed account is meticulously laid out. (Chernow’s sources are well documented in the concluding Notes and Bibliography.)
Twain had a mercurial temperament. (Today I’m guessing he’d be strongly encouraged to take some kind of mood stabilizer.) He found school to be dreadfully uninteresting but, when he found something on his own that caught his attention, he’d tear into it.
It’s been observed that Twain was America’s first celebrity. Photographs in the book show him socializing with the likes of Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton, and Helen Keller. You’ll get a sense of what those times in America were like for regular people. Twain’s managing of the Civil War is particularly gripping and, at times, humorous. “I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.”
Always a sensitive and empathetic fellow, the book traces Twain’s evolution from a person influenced by being born in the South to one who became much more cosmopolitan as he traveled extensively around the world chatting up all kinds of people from every level of different societies.
It’s also a good study into what a person does with the tragedy and traumatic events that often befall them in the course of a full life. Chernow displays a sophisticated and sensitive understanding of Twain’s personality.
If you are looking for a respite from today’s headlines, this is great fun.