Sunday Books & Culture - Biography

Ron Chernow's Mark Twain is a lift - whether it's worth it depends on your passion for the subject.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Published: May 2025
Publisher: Penguin
Price: $45
Available at local bookseller Tales and Tails
Kindle
Amazon

Just lifting Ron Chernow’s newest big book brought back memories of grad school. Historians are accustomed to digesting 1,000-page tomes, but it takes a perverse interest in sometimes-mind-numbing details to endure the tedium necessary to work through that many pages.

Chernow’s biography thankfully is short on tedium, but getting through the book is an exercise in endurance.

For the historically minded, it’s worth the effort.

If one’s impression of Twain is limited to encounters with his classic work Huckleberry Finn, Chernow’s exposing the great writer’s early racist mindset, arrogance, and unsettling interest in young girls later in his life will prove disconcerting.

His unusual marriage to Livy — a sickly, religious moralist — raises interesting questions about Twain’s understanding of love.

And Twain’s desire to live among, and on an equal footing with, the wealthiest patricians will make one question the extent to which his visions of “everyday” people are shaped more by his own difficult upbringing or nostalgic visions of simpler times that wealth allows people the time to conjure up in ways that most people cannot enjoy.

The consensus among scholars is that Chernow’s work breaks no real new ground when it comes to understanding Twain. Good history, however, needn’t necessarily do that.

Good history humanizes heroes, and peels back the layers of obsessive work that are the hallmarks of genius.

Chernow’s biography is no leisurely floating journey down Twain’s beloved Mississippi River. It’s a bit of a slog — though a well-written one — through the dirt and clay of the Southern lands that Twain both admired and despised (his family has roots in Virginia), and the muddy financial life of a man who believed too much of his own press regarding his genius.

But it’s a slog very much worth taking.

Nota Bene: Though Twain is best-known for Huckleberry Finn, it’s Life on the Mississippi that I’ve always believed his best, most-innovative work. One insight that Chernow brings to Twain’s psyche is that the only time the rumpled writer felt truly at peace were the very few years spent captaining steamships down the Mississippi.

For other takes on Chernow’s biography of Twain

• Book Review: ‘Mark Twain,’ by Ron Chernow - The New York Times

• The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain | The New Yorker

• ‘Mark Twain,’ by Ron Chernow, reviewed by Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

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