Customer Reviews

Mark Twain: God's Fool

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This is a well-written but very negative assessment of Twain's last years. Hill paints Twain as an irascible tyrant to his wife and his daughters, all of whom he intimates had nervous disorders. I am currently reading Michael Shelden's, MARK TWAIN: MAN IN WHITE[ASIN:0679448004 Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years]] which seems to paint these years quite differently. Instead of a bitter, lonely, and lost old man as Hill paints him, Shelden gives us a practical joker who was often in society and was hardly the old curmudgeon eager for death that Hill gives us. While I wouldn't want to whitewash Twain's faults as his daughter, Clara,and his early biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, conspired to do, I believe Hill's assessment is a too negative appraisal. Twain certainly had his faults which included the need to be the center of attention wherever he appeared, an amazing ineptitude in business, and a way of blaming publishers and friends for his problems. But this "Lincoln of Our Literature", as William Dean Howells called him, hardly deserves this one-sided portrayal. On the whole I would recommend Sheldon's assessment as well as the balanced biography of Twain's life by Ron PowersMark Twain: A Life.