The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography [Hardcover]

Fred Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2003

One of our most distinguished biographers offers a bold, revisionist view of the inimitable Mark Twain.

Mark Twain invented American literature. His humor, his fearless evocation of how ordinary people live and speak, his ferocious social criticism, all make him the progenitor of a truly national literature. And his extraordinary books—including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi—were drawn from his extraordinary life. Based on original research, including access to previously unpublished correspondence, The Singular Mark Twain presents the first fully integrated portrait of this great American icon.

Few Americans, let alone American writers, lived such a large and eventful life. From his idyllic Hannibal, Missouri, childhood to his days as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, from his wildcat-mining life in the Nevada territory to his reporting job in wide-open Barbary Coast San Francisco, Twain’s early life was one of restless adventure. He traveled the world, and his dispatches to the United States made him famous, and wealthy.

With maturity and success, Twain grew tremendously as an artist and as a social critic. Fred Kaplan shows definitively that Twain’s ferociously progressive ideas about race informed all his later works and absolve him from absurd charges of racism laid in recent years. Kaplan also details the darker side of Twain’s story—the illnesses and death that plagued his family and darkened his vision, his almost comically terrible business sense that lost him his great fortune, and his paranoid sensitivity to slights and betrayals.

No American writer is more appealing, funnier, or more universally admired than Mark Twain. The Singular Mark Twain brings him to life as never before. Like the bestselling books of H.W. Brands, David McCullough, and Edmund Morris, The Singular Mark Twain is a masterful blend of history and biography, at once erudite, eye-opening, and highly entertaining.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Kaplan begins his biographical assault on received wisdom about America's most famous novelist with the wordplay implicit in his title: Mark Twain was not only a singular writer (uniquely gifted and unsurpassed in his influence), but he was also a singular personality (not multiple or divided), his pen name signifying no deep psychic split of the sort critics have posited. Real contradictions do emerge in the life of a man who could, for instance, ridicule religion as foolish superstition and yet jump at the chance to publish the pope's authorized biography. But in these contradictions, Kaplan sees no more than the inconsistencies typical of a sophisticated mind, not deep fissures separating the artist Twain from the commercialist Clemens. Kaplan does limn a remarkably complex evolution in Twain's metamorphosis from a lightweight humorist with a flair for travel journalism into the probing author of a landmark novel on race relations, Huckleberry Finn. Yet Kaplan also highlights personal weaknesses that stubbornly resisted change: Twain's self-lacerating sense of guilt after every family tragedy; his foolish penchant for investing in unproven technologies; his vulnerability to personal and literary criticism. Never obtrusive, Kaplan's aesthetic and psychological insights inhere naturally in a lucid narrative. Like Kaplan's acclaimed biographies of Carlyle, Dickens, and James, this book will enlighten specialists and delight general readers. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

PRAISE FOR GORE VIDAL: A BIOGRAPHY

“Kaplan must be commended....a splendid job.”
--San Francisco Chronicle

“Intimate, rewarding….[Fred Kaplan] leads us back, with insight, to the works of this audacious American master.”
--Los Angeles Times

“It is in Kaplan that all the pieces of the puzzle are at last assembled….It is Kaplan who lets us see the seeds and the shoots, the leaves and the flowers—and alas, the weeds.”
--The Nation

PRAISE FOR DICKENS: A BIOGRAPHY
“Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography.”
--Los Angeles Times

“Anyone who has not read a life of Dickens is going to prefer Fred Kaplan’s long, solid, and illuminating biography furnished with new facts and theories, to any previous one they might encounter. The novelist who emerges from his study—dynamic, mercurial, self-deluding, with a big heart for the masses and a small one for his ego, makes fascinating reading.”
--Newsday

PRAISE FOR THOMAS CARLYLE: A BIOGRAPHY

“Mr. Kaplan illuminates the Victorian era by bringing us into what we feel is the very presence of one of its idols.”
--The New Yorker

“Fred Kaplan has performed a labor of love and a commendatory service. His Thomas Carlyle, which draws on unpublished letters, gives us our most complete picture of Carlyle in the context of his age…An achievement of much merit and a gift to students of the word.”
--Washington Post Book World

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (October 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385477155
• ISBN-13: 978-0385477154
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,037,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging and Revealing, November 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (Hardcover)

I felt drawn into Twain's world and the life that gave us Tom, Huck, the Connecticut Yankee and all Twain's political and religious convictions as never before. Fred Kaplan finally puts to rest those ill-founded murmurs about Twain being a racist with letters and documentation I'd never seen before; not to mention new information about Twain's strong position against American foreign incursions -- something ironically relevant these days. This "Singular Mark Twain" is such a complex, human, funny yet poignant figure, I only wished the book wouldn't end.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Suturing the severed, August 13, 2004

By 

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

This review is from: The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (Hardcover)

Several years ago Justin Kaplan sundered Sam Clemens and Mark Twain. It was an almost iconoclastic "psychological" study, typical of the times and thus immensely popular. It changed sharply the image of Clemens held by most Twain readers. Which one were they reading? Now Fred Kaplan has attempted to suture the parts and bring us a fresh picture of a whole man. Using new material and thorough analysis, Kaplan has produced a enduring biography of America's greatest writer. This study is comprehensive in scope and ably presented for long-time Twain aficionados. Newcomers to Clemens' work may be staggered by the wealth of information.

Pseudonyms were common among 19th Century journalists, Clemens' starting point in his writing career. Kaplan demonstrates that the detachment Clemens enjoyed as a "reporter" was transformed into a strong, unified character in his later writing. Factual works outlining his travel experiences later took second place to his fiction. While these books still carried the "Twain" banner, Kaplan shows it as an enlargement of his image, not a branching off. Fiction also enabled Twain to incorporate his linguistic attainments to a degree unmatched in his day. His portrayal of Mississippi Valley patois often led to critics labeling him "common", but Kaplan counters that Twain had a more comprehensive view of his fellow Americans than did most of his contemporaries.

Most contemporary readers of Twain were captivated by his humour, which was innovative and spirited. Kaplan, while recognising Twain's the appeal to his audience, gives little further acknowledgement to this aspect. Why, we wonder, did Twain, whose life was long beset by tragedies and the struggle for financial stability, continue to write with his unique form of wit. Even the latest works Twain produced were lively presentations, often heavy with irony. Kaplan relates this, but offers no explanation for its tenacity. Even Twain's inspired soliloquy of Belgium's King Leopold was laced with Mississippi Valley expressions. Reading any of the writings from Twain's long career, the light touch is always present, but it seems to slip by Kaplan with but scant notice.

Kaplan deals well, however, with Twain's serious side. Finances, in almost overwhelming detail, dominate the book. The problems with family - illness stalked the Clemens clan for decades - are thoroughly related. How many of these ills might be related to their economic plight? Twain saw firm links, described fully, but the biographer declines to judge their validity. Kaplan is stronger in description than in analysis. While this keeps him detached, the reader is offered few insights. No diagnosis of any of the family's illnesses intrude on the narrative. Kaplan also follows Twain's travels in detail, but the background panorama remains subtly hidden. A thorough knowledge of world events is a clear prerequisite for reading this life in context. The result is a straightforward relation of Twain's life, readable, thorough in personal details, but fails to place those intimacies within a broader scene.

The book will be welcomed by academics and those already well versed in Twain's life. Kaplan successfully refutes the claim that Clemens and Twain were separate personas, Twain shedding the intrusions of Clemens' financial worries or family illness when taking up his pen. Beyond that, Kaplan offers only descriptions of that background to Twain's successful writing career. A fine book, but limited in scope.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Trying to find balance in an unbalanced life, February 22, 2005

By 

J. Carroll "Jack" (Island Heights,NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (Hardcover)

Trying to reconcile the public perception of Mark Twain, the jovial raconteur and "Great American Author", with the significantly flawed Samuel Clemens, a particularly inept businessman who may have squandered his greatest gift in his endless pursuit of "easy money," is a difficult task. Kaplan does an admirable job working to heal this dichotomy; he sticks to focusing on Clemens the man, with all his qualities for good or ill. Kaplan does fine work developing the reader's understanding of how Twain's early years of wandering created the necessity of Twain the writer. The gradual evolution of Mark Twain is an interesting and at times riveting tale and Kaplan supplies all the details needed to experience this transition. As Twain ages and his focus shifts from writing to his pursuit of financial success at the level of America's richest men, Kaplan maintains his ability to tell Twain's story in an interesting fashion, but Twain's life becomes less interesting. Bogged down in bad business decisions and family health issues Twain becomes someone the reader will find less patience with. Kaplan does have some difficulty here, with choices that occasionally lead to judgmental writing. Phrases like "his flawed best," "He would shamelessly upstage anyone," and mentions of his self-centered nature and megalomania make their appearances periodically. Kaplan is particularly harsh when considering Twain in his final years when his daughter's influence was significant on an old man who was ill and afraid of losing any more family. But there is an overall sense that Kaplan is just showing an actuality based on his research.
The book does come up a little short when discussing Twain's literary output. Kaplan makes judgments on what was significant, but there definitely needed to be a more complete look at Twain's output and discussion of the literary merits of his work. It may have added a number of pages to the work, but I felt twain's work needed a closer examination, perhaps at the expense of some of the financial minutiae of Twain's bad business decisions. Overall Kaplan does an excellent job of examining Twain the man; I just wish a bit more time had been spent on Twain the writer.