Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Mark Twain

By Ron Chernow

Penguin Press 2025

It’s a reliable axiom: the more prominent the biographer, the less interesting the biographer’s books. Simon Callow’s thoroughly excellent biographical volumes on Orson Welles can act as a happy exception, but in general, the more high-profile a biographer is, the more likely it is that their books will be increasingly careful, diplomatic, rote, and, one sometimes suspects, outsourced. There’s usually a world of difference between “The new biography of Talleyrand (by Ferguson)” and “The new Ferguson (about Talleyrand).”

There’s no more prominent biographer in the world today than Ron Chernow (particularly since Walter Isaacson permanently disgraced himself with his servile 2023 biography of the Nazi Elon Musk). He’s won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the infinite swaggering rights of having had his biography of Alexander Hamilton become the basis for an insanely popular Broadway musical. He writes no short books and no minor ones; each is a weighty tome, an event in its season’s publishing schedule.

Generally speaking, this is cause to worry about Chernow’s new doorstop biography of Mark Twain. The book is 1200 pages long. It’s about an extremely well-chronicled and iconic subject, and that subject has already been the star of a hit Broadway play. Chernow could hire a couple of starving history grad students, polish the resulting pile of pages in his sleep, and still triple his bank balance with Father’s Day sales alone.

How many prospective readers can this thing seriously have? Buyers, yes, certainly – after all, it’s the new Chernow; bookshelves and coffee tables were made to display it. But actual readers? A 1200-page biography of an author who’ll always be far less interesting than his own books? And who left 2500 pages of autobiography that’ll always make better reading than anything anybody else could write about him?

The number can’t be large, and the ranks won’t exactly swell if those prospective readers check with the critics first. Whether it’s Lauren Michele Jackson’s politely damning piece in The New Yorker, condescendingly smearing dismissal over Chernow and Twain alike, or whether it’s Dwight Garner’s thundering pan in The New York Times, rightly questioning the book’s reason for existence.

“His biographers have tended to evoke him through the prism of Freudian psychoanalysis In that way he is seen as an interesting, if not terribly self-aware outpatient – a walking casebook of neuroses, unconscious tendencies, masks, and alternate identities,” Ron Powers wrote in his deeply brilliant 2005 book Mark Twain: A Life. “What is it about his writing – nearly all of it problematic, much of it mediocre, a healthy part of it unfinished, some of it simply awful – that continues to exercise the very scholars who expend so much energy trying to reduce him to their pet formulas and crusades?”

Powers scrupulously avoids pet formulas and crusades in his own book, which is beautifully written and infused with the kind of slow-take rhetorical humor its subject would have considered the highest personal tribute. Probably Chernow’s book would have elicited very different reactions. Chernow adopts throughout the pleasingly knowing tone of somebody who’s read lots of Twain’s correspondence and maybe some of those earlier biographies (the book comes with a large number of End Notes and a healthy Bibliography) and feels comfortable with the man’s personality. When Twain and family visit the famous Bayreuth Festival, for instance, we’re told:

Even though Wagner had died, the Wagner cult still flourished, and tourists overran the town each summer. Of course, Twain had been exposed to opera before, and the results were not pretty. Nothing aroused his wit more than a good, healthy grudge, and opera topped the list.

This kind of familiar tone makes for very smooth reading and can cover a multitude of sins. It’s a shame so many such sins are committed in these pages, which are filled with repeated lazy writing like “hearty appetite,” “imminent death,” “dark currents,” “urgent need,” and things done “with a vengeance.” There’s also a narrative swerve that’s by now become an embedded characteristic of this author, where he’ll spend a good deal of time describing one thing and then summarize his own descriptions with the exact opposite. As his story is following Twain into old age, for instance, old age itself becomes a subject. “In most lives there arrives a mellowing, a lovely autumnal calm that overtakes even the stormiest personalities,” Chernow writes. “In Twain’s case, it was exactly the reverse: his emotions intensified, his indignation at injustice flared ever more hotly, his rage became almost rabid.” But for a solid hundred pages before this pronouncement, Chernow himself has shown us a Twain sinking deeper and deeper into a calm and soupy sentimentality.

Chernow is not a particularly adept reader of Twain’s work (again, see Powers for that), and his descriptions of the larger world of 19th-century America or Europe are often jumpy and fragmented, which is downright bizarre in a book with 1200 pages of elbow-room. Given the investment they’re asking of the harried and time-pressed modern reader, those 1200 pages have far, far fewer strengths than they should. The best of these is the attention Chernow pays to the many women in Twain’s life, from his youngest daughter Jean and his oldest daughter Susy (both of whom he outlived) to his middle daughter Clara to his wife Olivia and his sister-in-law Susan to his long-time secretary Isabel and a half-dozen others. More so than in any of his earlier books, Chernow here finds his subject thickly ensconced in crowds of other people.

Until the end, of course, which comes for everybody alone. Twain died in 1910, having arranged for his gargantuan unexpurgated Autobiography to appear a century hence, as it did in hefty volumes beginning in 2010, and Chernow views this as one final, entirely characteristic gesture:

Even in death, he refused to repudiate the spotlight and showed with a flourish his posthumous mastery of public relations and his personal art of celebrity. The boy from Hannibal, who had always craved attention, was once again turning his old handsprings and cutting capers, only this time for the applause of posterity.

This is admittedly effective stuff, though terribly easy. The same might be said for all of Mark Twain, but only when the book is at its best. The rest is a slog of mediocre prose and overcrowded chapters. If Chernow writes his next biography at 250 pages under a pseudonym, I’ll buy him a sandwich.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News