Mark Twain: A Life [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Ron Powers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2005

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.

"No one understands the complicated American the world knows as Mark Twain better than Ron Powers. Finally, we have scholarship and writing worthy of the man. Powers's prose is insightful, elegant, and gets to the center of Twain's life, humor, tragedy, and outrage."

Ken Burns

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mark Twain grew up with America. Born in 1835, he reached adulthood as the country was expanding and threatening to splinter all at once. Along with his towering talent and personality, his timing and instinct for finding the action allowed him to play a major role in pushing the boundaries of American culture and mythology by creating a new approach to literature. "Breaching the ranks of New England literary culture was Clemens's most important achievement (short of his actual works), and a signal liberating event in the country's imaginative history," writes Ron Powers in this dazzling biography. Not only did he observe and chronicle this cultural shift, he participated in it, allowing him to report "from the yeasty perspective of the common man." While still Sam Clemens, he worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River and experienced the Wild West of the Nevada Territory as a miner, land prospector, and newspaperman. Later, while still the people's champion, he married into wealth and ran with the moneyed class of the Gilded Age--until his money ran out--and toured the world meeting with the famous and powerful at every stop. He was, as Powers puts it, "the nation's first rock star." But Twain was more than just a writer and Powers strives to cover all sides of this complex man. Employing an approach he calls "interpretive portraiture," he explores Twain's personal relations, temperament, religious skepticism, and psychology as closely as his written work. He discusses Twain's zeal for life along with his "chronic insecurity," and describes how this eternally optimistic and forward-looking man was prone to spells of nihilism and despair. Powers is a talented and lively writer clearly up to the task of covering this American legend, and his book vividly and thoroughly explains why Twain was "the representative figure of his nation and his century." --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. After dozens of biographies of Twain (1835–1910), one can fairly ask, "Why another?" But Powers, who wrote about Twain's Missouri childhood in Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, early on promises "interpretive portraiture," which entails doing something that has never quite been accomplished before: presenting the totality of the man in his many moods and phases of life, including acerbic son and brother, prank-prone youth, competitive writer, demanding friend, loving husband and, eventually, globe-trotting celebrity. In doing so, Powers succeeds in validating his own assertion that Twain became "the representative figure of his times." Powers demonstrates that Twain embodied America during the tumultuous latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, from the divided self of the Civil War, through the unstable prosperity of the Gilded Age, to the verge of WWI. All the while, Twain asserted in both literature and life his confidence in New World progress over Old World conservatism. Unlike Twain, whose prose Powers characterizes as "wild and woolly," the biographer is lucid and direct while maintaining a steady hand on the tiller of Twain's life as it courses a twisty path as wide and treacherous as the Mississippi itself. Powers, a wise, if loquacious captain, takes us on a wonderful journey from beginning to end. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743248996
• ISBN-13: 978-0743248990
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #619,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eminently Readable, October 17, 2005

By 

Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mark Twain: A Life (Hardcover)

Mediocre biographies are medicore for the same reason that boring histories are boring: they list facts and dates while providing little context that brings the subject to life. But good biographies bring the emotion, the context, the why behind the what, that brings you into intimate contact with a vibrant human life. Ron Power's Mark Twain is of the "good biography" sort. Indeed, it proved far more fascinating and readable than I had reason to suspect it would be when I bought it on a lark. Mark Twain comes through in clear colors. One can easily imagine the impact this wild fellow had with his drawl, rolling walk, and incisve humor. In addition, one comes away with an understanding of how Mark Twain was woven into the fabric on 19th Century USA. The relationship between Clemens/Twain and his time is as interesting as the man himself.

Power's biography was refreshing and interesting on every page. Honestly, there was never a dull page. He effectively weaves into a coherent whole the life experiences of Samuel Clemens, the shaping forces that stimulated the growth of Mark Twain the writer, and the life those books had in 19th Century US as a whole. This tri-fold story is woven together seamlessly and dynamically. One comes away learning so much about a remarkable American icon as well as the nature of the times he lived in.

Obviously, I really liked this book. It has piqued me to re-read Twain, and read some of Twain's works that I have never read. I would think that anyone interested in writing, literature, and American history would enjoy Power's biography as thoroughly as I did.

52 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An ordinary man - plus genius, November 8, 2005

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mark Twain: A Life (Hardcover)

At last! A rational, reasonable, but above all readable account of the man who gave the United States its most realistic voice. Biographies of Mark Twain are ranked along the shelves. From Paine through De Voto to Lystra's scurrilous depiction, Twain has been the subject of idolisation and iconoclasm. The Kaplans severed him and sutured him, but Twain has survived them all. Powers does more than simply restore Twain's reputation. He provides a picture of Clemens the man. More importantly, Powers gives us Clemens the observer, recorder and writer. The result is a robust work that will outlast its predecessors.

The past generation, tainted with "deconstruction", Freudian, feminist and anti-racist analyses of who Samuel Langhorne Clemens was, leaves many wondering why he should be venerated. Accusations of "crude" and "unlettered" still drift though writings about him. Powers lays these to rest with gentle, if firm, dismissals. Like any man, Clemens had his faults and foibles. His failures at business are the stuff of legend, but it was an era of freebooting capitalism. No vaccine had been developed to inoculate the innocent, and innocence was considered a virtue in Clemens' time. Powers carefully relates how "Sammy" who wanted to live forever on the Mississippi River, was snatched away from a life of absolute power - no-one dared challenge a steamboat pilot - to partake of an era for which he had no briefing.

From the childhood on the River, dominated by his austere father and religious mother, Sam Clemens moved across America to avoid the conflict he had no taste for. The escape to Nevada and the Comstock opened many opportunities for discovery. His own Mother Lode turned out to be people. Powers follows Clemens on his prospecting for personalities. The mining ventures, the reporter's role and world travel each produced their own literary nuggets. In a time without jets or SUVs, Clemens' voyages seem almost astonishing. Yet every trip and their stops provided fresh nuggets he would refine and reproduce for our delight. Powers shows that the portrayals are far more than just "reporting" on the Western way of life. They are harbingers of what was making the United States

Powers' view of his subject avoids the popular form of "deep" analysis. Instead, he demonstrates how far-reaching Twain's views proved. He found his nation's imperialist ventures abhorrent, and Powers' presentation of it is subtly topical. He uses Clemens' voice for his own - "he made a book of a Paige" referring to the aftermath of the bankruptcy would be a perfect Twain aphorism. Powers carefully analyses Clemens' writing prowess, noting both strengths and weaknesses with professional candor. "Huckleberry Finn", considered by many to be the greatest of the novels, takes a sharp turn in Powers view. The "break", he says, follows the "Wagnerian aria" of Huck's damning himself for protecting Jim's identity. Following that event, the biographer condemns Tom Sawyer's "evasion" scheme as anticlimatic to the vitality of this outstanding work.

Having produced a "life" that reads with an easy familiarity, Powers should be applauded for restoring Clemens as a human being, a literary icon and as the voice of the United States of his day. Clemens successfully broke the patterns of both Boston Brahmin intellectualism and the frequently disdainful view of Victorian commentators. Powers manages this without speculation or judgement, simply offering Twain's expressive words in their context. Having produced other works about Clemens' youth and environment, he's capped the "set" with an outstanding biography. Anyone wishing to learn about Clemens should start here. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pleasure to spend time in his presence, October 1, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Mark Twain: A Life (Hardcover)

The first great advantage of this book is that it gives the reader the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the presence of an enormously complicated, interesting and humorous character , Mark Twain. A second advantage is that it does this by giving a detailed description of the time and world in which Twain lived in. It takes the reader through the wandering Twain's adventures in America , and as an innocent abroad. It relates turning point moments in Twain's life in a dramatic way, as for instance his meeting with William Dean Howells in the Atlantic's office in Boston, a meeting which not only open a forty- one year old friendship but pave the way for Twain's acceptance by the New England Literary culture which dominated American Letters.
Powers also gives insight into the unique genius of Twain. There is a wonderful paragraph in which he describes the child's gift for hearing and seeing in unusual ways. And how this gift would totally transform American literature bringing into the colloquial voices of so many different American worlds.
There have been other very good biographies of Mark Twain but this one in its most detailed reading of the life is a real contribution to our understanding of America's greatest comic writer.