The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891-1910
By Gary Scharnhorst
University of Missouri Press, 2022

Gary Scharnhorst, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, has finally finished his grand three-volume biography of Mark Twain at last. What began with “the beginning years” and continued in “the middle years” concludes with The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891-1910, new from the University of Missouri Press. This trilogy is a monument of careful and exhaustive scholarship, and the reason you probably haven’t heard of it can’t be laid exclusively at the feet of the fact that it’s being produced by a university press (unless you’ve got the deep pockets of Yale or Harvard or Princeton, you’re unlikely to be fielding even your lead titles to many bookstore New Releases tables). 

No, part of the blame – if blame is quite the right word – also attaches to what kind of a biography Scharnhorst has written. There’s a perennial market for new biographies of Mark Twain, but those are popular-audience one-volume treatments. Scharnhorst has produced an old-fashioned multi-volume scholarly biography of his subject, with minute-by-minute specificity and a thick sub-strata of notes and supporting material. It’s a Victorian whopper of a feat, quite possibly the definitive life of this most famous of American writers. But it’s no casual thing. You wouldn’t buy it for your dad. You probably wouldn’t buy it for yourself either, unless you were really, really interested in Mark Twain.

This is obvious from the first paragraph, for Pete’s sake. No Preface, no Introduction, no Dramatis Personae, just immediately this:

Not even Samuel Clemens knew how deeply he was in debt, though he had staunched the gush of red ink from the publishing company he owned. When he sailed with his family to Europe in June 1891, he believed that Charles L. Webster and Company, his publishing house, owed its creditors about $80,000, not including over $70,000 his wife Olivia had advanced the firm. He later learned that the figure, including Livy’s loah, was closer to $200,000, nearly $6 million in today’s money. He spent most of the next decade escaping from this “bondage of debt.” 

So: very much in medias res – Twain has lived a long, colorful, and complicated life before this volume, ominously titled “The Final Years,” jumps off. The twenty years covered by this volume were increasingly somber ones for Twain (Scharnhorst opts for calling him “Sam,” and if anybody’s earned the right …), years in which he lost two daughters and hls beloved wife Livy (in a heartbreaking scene, he comes to her coffin in the early morning after her death and simply looks at her face), years in which he experienced a steady lessening of his physical abilities. 

Scharnhorst charts it all in painstaking detail. He’s there in every moment with all the assembled documentation those moments can bear, honestly more detail than most readers will think they want for any given moment in Twain’s life. One manifestation of this completist tick, for instance, will be fascinating mainly to critics interested in the full breadth of contemporary responses to everything Twain wrote. Scharnhorst has scoured the archives for such responses and provides a battery of them for all the works written during these years. Take Twain’s angry, hilarious King Leopold’s Soliloquy:

The Baltimore American (“a terrible arraignment of King Leopold”), Washington Times (a “forceful indictment”), Chicago Inter Ocean (“the most violent attack upon the Belgian monarch that has yet appeared”), Montgomery Times (“the most scathing arraignment of the century”), and Sioux City Journal (one of the most terrible arraignments ever put into English”) … The Buffalo Commercial  (“blighting”), Chicago Advance (“a very fine and most mirth-provoking big of sarcasm”), New Haven Journal and Courier (horrors “vividly depicted” with “a caustic pen”), Nashville Tennessean (“a powerful voice” added “to the clamor for retribution”), and New York Observer (a “most effective” and “biting satire”) …

The Twain in this volume is, predictably, a Mark Twain in decline. He steadily restricts his activities, and although he usually tries to put a humorous phrasing on things, the mordant notes are clearer with every year:

Since his return to the United States in 1900 at the age of sixty-five, Sam had begun to dial back his public appearances and the frequency of his speeches. He wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, for example, that he had pledged “to take no engagements outside the city & not more than 2 per month in it. They can’t improve on this happiness in heaven.” Invited to return to Yale, he replied that he was determined “not to speak anywhere outside New York City except at funerals.” 

Twain stays writing to the end, his mind crystal-clear even as his health continues to fail. Even when he can no longer walk comfortably more than a dozen paces, he contents himself that he can still sit in bed and work. And when he dies, Scharnhorst does a galloping roundup again, this time of public pronouncements of condolences and appreciation from people like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Helen Keller, Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and countless others. 

Scharnhorst takes the story a bit further, to final arrangements and bequests and lawsuits, but the thing that will likely last in the reader’s mind will be a touching poem by journalist Arthur Krock:

Old Innocence has gone abroad, and the sea is wide between;

I saw his hand on the misty wheel as he steered for the darkened main.

He took his laugh and he took his pipe and the place where his heart had been,

And he crossed the bar where the waters gulped the plumb-line below mark twain.

He has steered from the flats and the yellow flood that he knows from bed to brim

To the greenish gush of a stranger wave that bathes every western star;

And ‘Give me my glasses,’ I heard him say – for the night of the Lord is dim,

And the salt spray blinds and the wind cuts cold as the ship sails out by the bar.

‘Twould be time to weep for the good grey head that is lost in the driving spray

Were there not in my study window here a boy with a puckered lip,

And he whistles shrill, “Oh, Buff’lo gals, ain’t you com’ out today?”

So I know tonight that he’ll join Huck Finn and go for a pirate trip.

‘Twould be time to weep for the one that’s gone did the boys he loved go, too;

But Tom and Joe and Sid and Huck on my study shelves I spy.

So good-by, Mark Twain, may you steer far out; may the wheel at your helm turn true;

And I’ll keep Tom straight while you’re off to sea, and for Huck – well, Mark, I’ll try.

A bit on the sappy side, true, but even so, Mark Twain might have agreed: as long as the books survive, something of the writer survives. And for the rest, every moment and detail of the rest, we now have this three-volume masterwork for the scholars and the endlessly curious.

-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 writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.