18-07-2025
Mark Twain was a literary celebrity with a moral compass
Mark Twain. By Ron Chernow. Penguin Press; 1,200 pages; $45. Allen Lane; £40
THE OCTAGONAL study overlooks the green of Elmira College in upstate New York. In it, Mark Twain wrote 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", along with umpteen other stories, articles and speeches. Twain spent his most productive summers on his wife's family's farm in Elmira, writing by day and reading his work to his wife and children on the porch in the evening. The unusual shape notwithstanding, the study is small, austere and unremarkable—three words that are in every way the opposite of Twain's life.
In fact, argues Ron Chernow in a titanic new biography, Twain was 'the largest literary personality that America has produced". He is the first literary figure to receive the Chernow treatment: in the past the Pulitzer-prizewinning biographer has focused on tycoons (John D. Rockefeller), presidents (George Washington) and treasury secretaries (Alexander Hamilton, a book which, improbably, inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical).
Mr Chernow argues that Twain 'fairly invented our celebrity culture". It is true that Twain's biting wit, along with his oratorical and self-promotional skills, made him a star, as beloved by the crowds who packed into halls to watch him speak as by presidents and the literati. But that is not why generations of American children read him in school, nor why he still deserves to be read today. What he really invented was a way of being American in the world and on the page: bold, irreverent and unpretentious. Twain was the laureate of America's unruly adolescence.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30th 1835, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. His father was anxious, stern and, as Mr Chernow notes, 'forbiddingly humourless"; his mother was pious and quick-witted. Like Abraham Lincoln, Twain was a product of the American frontier. What he lacked in formal education he made up for in ambition.
Hannibal sits on the banks of the Mississippi river, which, in the pre-railroad days, was perhaps America's most important commercial artery. The river gave the author his name: the cry 'mark twain" from a boatman meant that the river was of safely navigable depth. To him the river represented liberty and a connection to the wider world. In his most famous novel, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Huck (the narrator) and Jim (his enslaved companion) were free and relatively equal on the water, but harassed by the law and a host of unsavoury characters on land.
Twain's upbringing put him in close contact with black Americans. The Missouri of Twain's youth was a slave state. His father owned and rented people. His mother took a dim view of abolitionism. Yet as a boy Twain enjoyed listening to people telling stories in the 'negro quarter" of his uncle's farm. He became an ardent opponent not just of slavery, but of racial discrimination in almost any form.
In his writings he railed against the vile bigotry common in his day and supported women's suffrage long before it was popular. William Dean Howells, Twain's editor at the Atlantic, called him 'the most desouthernised southerner I ever met. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery."
That abhorrence comes through clearly in 'Huckleberry Finn", from which Ernest Hemingway claimed 'all modern American literature comes". Twain quipped in a preface to the novel that 'Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Both moral and plot are evident in the book. In its celebration of vernacular speech, sympathy with the underdog and lack of pretence, the book created a uniquely American style of fiction.
Jim was Twain's most radical creation. Readers today might be put off by his stereotypical dialect, superstition and devotion to Huck, but he was perhaps the first nuanced black character written by a white novelist. Jim is thoughtful and decent, possessed of all the compassion that Huck's own father, an abusive drunkard, never provided, Mr Chernow argues.
Once a mainstay of school curricula, in recent years 'Huckleberry Finn" has fallen out of favour. The book is 'banned from most American secondary schools", Mr Chernow writes, 'and its repetitive use of the n-word has cast a shadow over Twain's reputation." But readers who see past the use of that ugly word (common in Twain's time) will find a work that—in its panoply of cruel southern whites blind to Jim's intellect and manifest virtues—shows how bigotry not only harms its victims, but also deforms the people who spout it.
Huck yes
Mr Chernow devotes curiously little space to the novel. Instead, his biography spends a great deal of its 1,200 pages on topics such as the young Twain's hair-care habits, his opinion on street cleaning in the city of Buffalo and his disappointments later in life. By around page 700 even the most devoted Twainiac may wish the book had a more vigorous editor.
Still, Mr Chernow's doorstopper is worth reading for its portrait of an author sure of himself and his gifts, even as he toiled as a steamboat pilot or printer's devil, and its insight into the frenetic, violent, optimistic country that made him.
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