In the most important narrative biography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in half a century, a Pulitzer-Prize winner brings to life the astonishing man behind one of America's most famous sons.

Reviews

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. Agent, Jim Hornfischer. (Sept. 20) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Unlike some earlier Twain biographies (Justin Kaplan's 1966 Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, for instance), which organized the details of Twain's life according to an underlying but persistent single theory of personality, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Powers uses a positively Twainian approach: he simply tells the complex story of America's foremost storyteller. With considerable help from the new Mark Twain Project in Berkeley, CA (a veritable storehouse of Twain information consisting of books, letters, and documents hitherto unpublished), Powers has written a scholarly but refreshingly lively story, from time to time interrupting his straight narrative with a deft piece of wordplay ("operating, perhaps, on the proverbial theory that we cannot have `archaic'; and edit, too"). Instead of elaborating on a single major thesis, Powers develops topics neglected by other Twain biographers: the writer's genuinely mean late treatment of his bumbling brother, Orion; the negative impact of advancing technology on Twain's capacity for visual description; and his principled determination, late in life, to repay every cent he owed his creditors. The book offers a fresh commentary on all Twain's works and a lucid historical setting for them, too. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Charles C. Nash, formerly with English Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

"There is nothing jaded or recycled about Ron Powers's masterly portrait....He does justice to a comic, tragic, inspiring American life, and the reader shares his unwillingness to let go when it is time for Twain to die in the final, heart-stopping paragraph." -- Paperback of the Week, "Observer"