A Plain-Spoken Profile of Twain

This superbly illustrated biography of Mark Twain, a companion volume to Ken Burns’ four-hour PBS television series scheduled for January, documents a life that continues to have the compelling power of myth and legend. The novelist and critic William Dean Howells called Twain “the Lincoln of our literature” and said he never tired of hearing the “Arabian Nights story” of his friend’s life.

From a memorable boyhood in Hannibal, Mo., Sam Clemens moved on to steamboat piloting on the Mississippi, silver-mining and journalism in the West, world travel and world fame as Mark Twain--novelist, performer, preeminent American humorist, universal sage and gadfly. He enjoyed wealth, social status, domestic happiness and the possession of a house, largely built to his specifications, that today is one of the major attractions of Hartford, Conn. The house on Farmington Avenue symbolized his public success and private fulfillment. Twain’s life bridged the eras of the Pony Express and the automobile, the river raft and the millionaire’s yacht, the family farm and the urbanized nation, the Gold Rush and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Twain’s celebrity was so great that he was instantly recognizable on the streets of a dozen world capitals. He boasted he was “the most conspicuous person on the planet.” Disastrous investments, bankruptcy, the death of his favorite daughter and a general darkening of his spirit in later life added a dimension of tragic heroism.

Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns supply a straightforward retelling of the Mark Twain story. Their writing is sometimes marred by narrative cliches (“grueling lecture tour,” “plunged into debt,” “tragedy struck again”--all on one page) that may be organic to voice-over narration. The biographical narrative in this handsome book is enlivened by wonderful quotations from Twain and, to a lesser extent, by free-standing essays by five contributors, among them Hal Holbrook. He’s been the living stage presence of Twain for more than 40 years and, we’re told here, is “able to recite more than twelve hours of Mark Twain’s writings from memory--allowing him to tailor each performance to different audiences and different times.”

Ron Powers, who grew up in Hannibal, writes with authority and tenderness about his and Twain’s hometown. John Boyer, architectural historian and executive director of the Mark Twain house, discusses this category-defying edifice, part steamboat, part medieval stronghold and part cuckoo clock. Russell Banks cites Twain’s “enormous force for social good....Like all the great writers, [he] reminds us, and by reminding teaches us, what it is to be human.” In the most provocative (and bracing) of these pieces, Jocelyn Chadwick, who teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, tackles the thorny issues of racism and book-banning prompted largely by Twain’s more than 200 iterations of the word “nigger” in “Huckleberry Finn.” “Coming to grips with Mark Twain’s greatest novel means coming to grips with who we are,” she writes. “America still needs to read Twain’s novel and feel the sting of the six-letter word.”

Among major 19th century writers, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville scarcely exist as far as the visual record is concerned: one Dickinson daguerreotype, maybe half a dozen Melville portraits. But for Twain and Walt Whitman, both masterful self-promoters, visual presentation and visual detail--Twain’s white suit, mustache and shock of hair; Whitman’s beard and open shirt--were essential instruments of their celebrity, trademarks they worked so skillfully to establish and disseminate. They were both creatures of the age of photography and advertising, their faces even appearing on cigar boxes (although Whitman didn’t smoke).

The great strength of this new biography of Twain is its 276 illustrations and photographs, many of them reproduced here for the first time. They trace him through the years, follow him on his travels around the world, in public and with his wife and children. You’ll see him dressed in a bathing suit and a straw bonnet for a family game of charades; perched in the cab of a Great Northern Railroad locomotive on his way to a round-the-world lecture tour; and standing in a crowd on Fifth Avenue, wearing a silk hat and pretending not to notice the stir he caused.

In 1902 the returning hero posed for photographers in front of the tiny Clemens family house on Hill Street in Hannibal: It’s a reflexive display of camera consciousness, the picture of a man having his picture taken.

At one end of the visual arc of Twain’s meteoric career is a daguerreotype of a 15-year-old bushy-haired printer’s apprentice holding up three pieces of block-letter type to spell the name SAM, a gesture symbolic and predictive of the decades to follow. At the arc’s other end is an eerie picture of Twain, in his famous white suit and lying in his coffin at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. The camera shutter had remained open; the mourners filing past appear as a blurred spectral procession, not quite a choir of angels.

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Mark Twain on the Business of Words

“Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling: with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it--the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”

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Justin Kaplan wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.” With his wife, the novelist Anne Bernays, he is co-author of a forthcoming memoir, “Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York.”