Why this book:I like so many people have been a fan of Mark Twain for much of my life. I have recently re-read Huckleberry Finn in preps for reading (listening to) James by Percival Everett.  Also I have read three other Chernow biographies which I thought were awesome: Grant, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington.  When I saw that Chernow was publishing his bio of Mark Twain, I jumped on it.  Listened to it. 

Summary in 4 Sentences: This is a comprehensive look at Mark Twain’s life, based on SO MUCH material, from his diaries, letters to others, and their letters to him.  He was one of the most famous people in the world during his lifetime, so people saved his extensive correspondence and much of it has survived.  In short, Chernow  (again) does a masterful job bringing his subject to life, and providing his own commentary along the way.  I describe this to my friends as providing so much detail it was like getting into his Twain’s head and experiencing America and the world through his eyes – he lived a rich and full life, but was surprisingly unhappy and sad, especially toward the end of his life, and Chernow shares how much of this unhappiness was not just built into his idealistic, yet cynical character, but also a result of his own decisions.  

My Impressions: This is  long book at 735 pages which I listened to in 11 hours. It is a deep dive into the life of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain – his life, his thoughts and feelings, his idiosyncrasies, his humor and wit, his occasional hypocrisy and character flaws, as well as his vengeful anger at individuals who he believed let him down, and his disapproval of the human foibles he saw with a clearer eye than most, and that he described with a twinkle in his eye.  

Listening to this book had a key advantage:   the reader did voices for the primary characters in the book – most especially Twain himself.   The book is full of quotes from Twain’s journals and letters which the reader recites to us in what seemed to me to be an authentic old southern gentleman’s scratchy and ironic voice – bringing Twain almost to life.  And he did his best to render the voices of the key women in his life – his wife Livy, his daughters, Susie, Clara, and Jean, and his woman secretary Isabel Lyon in different suitably feminine sounding voices. 

This biography is very thorough – Chernow had loads of material, to include Mark Twain’s lifetime of diaries and journals, the hundreds of  letters he’d written over a lifetime (Twain was a prolific letter writer and people saved his letters) as well as trunks full of letters he’d received.  And Twain dictated an autobiography that his will and trust demanded not be published until 100 years after his death- which was honored.  Twain’s autobiography of nearly 500 pages was published in 2010.  All this material, and Chernow’s extensive experience and well-earned reputation for writing great biographies of America’s greats, serves us well.  Chernow does a masterly job of describing Twain’s long and multi-faceted life and conflicted character,  from Twain’s own, his family’s, and his many friends perspectives, adding all along the way Chernow’s own views and judgments of Twain’s character, decisions, strengths and weaknesses. One review I read states, “the biography offers an authoritative portrait that balances Twain’s rollicking public persona with the darker complexities of his private life.” (Super Summaries) 

We begin with his family background and his early years, sourced mostly from Twain’s own writings and recollections. His relationship to his strong but unhappy and unsuccessful father certainly played an important role in his development – his mother doted on him and remained a huge fan for much of his life until she passed.  We learn about his fascination with the Mississippi, how he became a printer for his brother and then an anonymous but popular columnist in his brother’s paper, his various efforts to break out of Hannibal, Missouri, his time as a riverboat captain which he describes as the happiest time in his life, how and why he finally headed west, seeking his fortune in mining in Nevada, and writing for a local paper, before heading to San Francisco, where again he wrote columns for a local newspaper. 

His breakthrough came when he was hired to travel to the newly settled Hawaiian Islands from where he sent articles back to be published in series in his sponsoring newspaper.  Upon his return, he nervously began his career as a speaker – telling stories about his impressions and adventures in the exotic Islands, much to the pleasure and amusement of his audiences.  He was always in need of money and public speaking and telling stories earned him a living – and gave him practice that served him well later on.  He went on to publish a book about his trip to Hawaii which did well and earned him the attention of many.   His career as an author and speaker was off to the races.

He returns to the East Coast to continue his speaking as his reputation grew.  He met, courted and married Olivia Langdon who was the love of his life for the rest of his life – Chernow takes us through that awkward and difficult courtship, which ended up being a pivotal point in his life – as his wife Livy was key to his future success, blunting the edge of his anger at people and events which disappointed him, dampening his propensity for seeking revenge, and creating  embarrassing public controversy. And then he got the contract to join a group of Americans on a long cruise to Europe and the Holy Lands, his recounting of which became The Innocents Abroad, which truly launched his career. 

At this point, we are barely a quarter of the way through the book. Twain had a rich and very life which I will not try to summarize.  But here is a list of some of what learned about Twain that surprised me: 

• He was always chasing schemes to strike it rich – he dreamt of being independently very wealthy – and eventually got there, then was in debt for much of his adult life, living the lifestyle of the rich and famous in the Gilded Age that he sought,  but his bank account did not yet justify. 
• His best selling book in his lifetime was Innocents Abroad, but he was best known internationally for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry  Finn.
• He fell in love with, courted over many months a reluctant Olivia Langdon, then after they married,  adored her almost beyond what is healthy.  She returned his affection, while she held on to the reins when Twain’s wild streak got hold of him. 
• He and his family spent 9 years living in Europe when he could no longer afford to live in the style he and Livy were used to in the US.  While there he was regarded as a major celebrity, and regularly was invited to speak and entertain throughout Europe – the educated classes could speak English, 
• He was deeply in debt for much of his adult life from bad investments and business decisions.  He falsely believed he had a great head for business and opportunities to make a financial killing.  He squandered his own fortune and that he and Livy had inherited from her family, investing in ill-conceived efforts to get unbelievably wealthy..
• He eventually paid back his debts after many years, undertaking exhausting speaking tours, and writing to make money to pay those debts.
• Also to earn money, he and Livy made an exhausting one year around-the-world speaking tour, which included the US, the Hawaiian Islands, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Britain
• As America’s best known author, satirist, and humorist, he was welcomed in the highest levels of society, knew President Teddy Roosevelt, (with whose politics he vehemently disagreed)  as well as many of the most prominent figures of the second half of the 19th century.
• Politically he was quite progressive, though Chernow regularly takes him to task for some hypocrisy in his attitudes toward black Americans.  As Twain grew older and less concerned with how he would be viewed by “polite society” he became increasingly strident in his support for progressive causes and the citizen rights of black Americans.
• He hated America’s, and Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist ambitions and the sense of American exceptionalism. He saw it as hypocrisy given how our nation was formed.  He wrote numerous articles condemning British and other European imperialist nations policies and how they treated natives in the lands they’d conquered. He vehemently opposed the US annexation of the Philippines. 
• A large part of his humor was pointing out and satirizing the hypocrisy and human foibles he and the rest of is see in people every day – Twain points them out sometimes gently, occasionally viciously.
• Twain went back and forth between being agnostic and atheistic.  One of his favorite targets for his wit was religion and the hypocrisy of the religiously righteous.  His agnosticism put him at odds with his wife, so he normally kept that to himself – while she was alive.
• After his wife died, there are no apparent efforts to connect intimately with a potential second wife, or with any woman for that matter. Consistent with the times and Victorian mores, he was  very prudish sexually and avoided reference to sex or sexuality in his writing – until the very end.
• He doted on his three daughters – in fact, in my opinion, spoiled them in his and Livy’s efforts to raise them to be “ladies” and icons of upper class privilege and values.  
• His later years were particularly sad after losing his oldest daughter Suzy to illness, and then his wife, and finally his youngest daughter Jean.  Clara, his middle daughter out lived him by half a century, but she and he were never particularly close.
• He remained sharp into his old age, but he wasn’t particularly healthy. For much of his life, he smoked cigars almost incessantly – reportedly regularly 40 cigars in a day.  As his energy significantly diminished, in his late 60s and early 70s, he withdrew to his home and significantly restricted his social and public appearances.
• After Livy died, he had a bizarre relationship with his secretary Isabel Lyon. She idolized him and he praised her to the moon for her support and loyalty to him and his many administrative and other needs. Twain gave her much of the authority of a wife (minus sex and overt romanticism) but he never seemed to consider marrying her, and was angered by rumors that they were engaged.  Marrying her would have made sense. Later, when he believed she had misled him about something relatively minor compared to the service she’d given him, he dismissed her and treated her very harshly. 
• In his later years, he had an obsession with young girls, between the ages of 12 and 16.  He became a grandfatherly friend to many such young girls, wrote them letters, had them over to his house, always chaperoned.  He called them his “angel fish” in his “aquarium”.  Though Chernow addresses how unseemly this appears to us today, he notes that there was never any indication or hint of sexual predation or unseemly behavior on Twain’s part with his various Angel Fish. It all appeared at the time as a grandfatherly attraction to surrogate grand daughters.  His daughter Clara is the only one in the book who seemed to be uncomfortable with his relationships with these young girls. 
• He in many ways struck me a bit like Donald Trump in that if he liked someone, he praised them to the heavens, but when he decided he didn’t like someone, or felt he’d been let down or betrayed, he became vicious and hateful, and publicly condemned them, with unique Mark Twain’s sardonic wit.  

One of the many insights of this book are in the picture it gives of America in the 2nd half of the 19th century, especially in the upper class world inhabited by Twain after he’d achieved fame as America’s favorite humorist and author.  Twain loved being considered part of the upper classes and loved that life style, though he lampooned it regularly in his humor.  As I write this review, I’m reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which John Fowles satirizes the hypocrisy, superficiality, prudery, and rigid adherence to conventional propriety of the upper class  British in the Victorian era.  The world he describes fits pretty accurately the world Mark Twain inhabited in the final two thirds of his life.   Americans of wealth and class continued to see the British aristocracy as the apogee of culture and refinement, and sought to emulate them by adopting their Victorian values, pretenses, and superficiality in nearly every way.  And Twain loved living in that world, while he also so accurately and bitingly made fun of it. 

It is a long book- a great biography – a total immersion leap into the life of Mark Twain.  For those interested in Mark Twain and that period of the Gilded Age in American history, I can’t recommend it highly enough.  At the end, I do wish Chernow had given us a brief epilogue. After Twain’s death, I was curious to know what happened to several of the key characters we had followed in the book:  Isabell Lyon, his daughter Clara, some of his other friends and close associates who had been so important in his life.  But when Twain finally passes, with the arrival of Haley’s comet as he’d predicted, the book, like his life was over.