Mark Twain, Ron Chernow. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9780525561729) 2025.

Summary: Beyond literary greatness, the complicated, brilliant, tragic, and sometimes eccentric life of one of America’s greatest writers.

The United States has produced no one like Mark Twain. From printer’s devil to riverboat pilot to prospector. A prodigious writer, a globe-circling lecturer, and a businessman deluded by an over-estimate of his own shrewdness. A loving husband devoted to Livy in a once-idyllic household, that by degrees grew both toxic and tragic for two of his three daughters. And a colorful old man with eccentricities that most of us today would consider “creepy.” The reader who embarks on this 1000-plus page journey will find all this and more in Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain.

Chernow traces the youthful and early adult experiences of Twain, so formative both for his major works, and of his character. We learn of the poverty that Twain sought to escape by one get-rich scheme after another. The death of his brother Henry on a riverboat explosion filled him with both grief and guilt. Then there is his older brother Orion, who helped him early on but who wandered aimlessly through life, assisted by Twain even when Twain couldn’t afford it.

Then Chernow describes an idyllic period, when Twain’s writing and lecturing career begins accruing the fortune for which he hoped. Added to this, he married into wealth when he married Livy Langdon. In the years that followed three daughters followed, growing up in a spacious Hartford home that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

They lived a lavish life at home and on the road, sustained in part by Livy’s fortune, but actually beyond their means. Twain sought to correct this in business ventures. Chernow traces a painful downward spiral, first of a publishing venture, and then the money pit of a failed typesetting machine. Twain so encumbered the family funds that it would be necessary to declare bankruptcy.

Twain would eventually work his way out of debt by writing and speaking but at a terrible cost. The family escaped to Europe for nine years to escape debtors and reduce costs. Relentless travel exacerbated the heart condition Livy suffered from. And Twain was emotionally unavailable and physically separated from his oldest daughter Susy, who was lesbian at a time this could not be spoken of. Twain, for all his “edginess” was pretty conventional when it came to matters of sexuality. Susy died while he was in Europe and he forever blamed himself.

Things could have been far worse for Twain, had he not received the help of Henry Rogers, A Standard Oil executive who helped get Twains finances on a sound footing. Chernow’s account makes him out to be both shrewd and selfless.

Livy’s worsening health combined with Twain’s youngest daughter Jean’s epilepsy left Twain a man besieged. In addition, a life of cigar smoking was beginning to take a toll on his own health. All of this opened the door for him to be taken advantage of by two assistants, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. Before marrying Ashcroft, it was clear Isabel had a strong emotional attachment to Twain. She worked for paltry wages, managed household and administrative tasks, and gained an unhealthy influence. She succeeded in exiling Jean to a series of asylums. Ashcroft also mishandled funds. The two were dispelled only when middle daughter Clara stepped in. Sadly, Jean was only briefly restored to the Twain household before she preceded him in an untimely death.

Chernow also offers an extensive account of Twain’s fascination with young girls, his “angelfish.” He formed a club for them with a special room in his house. He wrote endearing letters. While there is no evidence of any abuse, it was troubling strange, harking back to a youthful romance.

Finally, Chernow explores Twain’s religious views. He had little tolerance for conventional Christianity, to Livy’s dismay and the eventual erosion of Livy’s faith. Late in life, he wrote more openly about his skepticism. One wonders how much went back to his brother Henry’s death, as well as the other tragedies he experienced. This makes all the more extraordinary the long friendship with Hartford pastor Joseph Twichell. One wishes you could overhear some of their conversations.

I had mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Twain, even at his most eccentric is a fascinating subject for a biography. But for the first time in reading a Chernow biography, I felt myself asking, ‘how much longer must this go?” This was most notable in the case of his business woes. I wanted to grab Twain and shake him and suggest that he ditch all this and write and lecture and just make rather than lose money. But one also felt this in the account of Twain’s relationship with both Susy and Jean and his entanglement with Isabel Lyon. All this was painful, but it also felt drawn out. Likewise, I found this so with Twain’s relationship with the “angelfish.”

This all needed to be there but I felt it overshadowed Twain’s writing. It’s not that Chernow didn’t chronicle that and assess Twain’s various works. But it seems that in this account, I felt the writing life just punctuated Twain’s private life and business ventures. I can imagine other readers might think differently!

All in all, this is another of Chernow’s landmark biographies. I suspect the challenge was the sheer plethora of documentary resources in Twain’s journals, letters, manuscripts, and other historical sources. Given that, it is perhaps a miracle that he was able to reduce all this to a thousand pages! Through all that, he succeeds in helping us appreciated the complicated and unique greatness of Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain.

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