Mark Twain: A Life

I can add nothing to the other reviews here. I would add, sadly, that Powers' excellent biography of Mark Twain would unlikely to ever appear on the list of a university press, at least without a lot of editing. Scholarship is not the issue. Powers puts himself into the book and makes comments that no university press would tolerate. Rather, they would insist on bland prose.

At last! A rational, reasonable, but above all readable account of the man who gave the United States its most realistic voice. Biographies of Mark Twain are ranked along the shelves. From Paine through De Voto to Lystra's scurrilous depiction, Twain has been the subject of idolisation and iconoclasm. The Kaplans severed him and sutured him, but Twain has survived them all. Powers does more than simply restore Twain's reputation. He provides a picture of Clemens the man. More importantly, Powers gives us Clemens the observer, recorder and writer. The result is a robust work that will outlast its predecessors. The past generation, tainted with "deconstruction", Freudian, feminist and anti-racist analyses of who Samuel Langhorne Clemens was, leaves many wondering why he should be venerated. Accusations of "crude" and "unlettered" still drift though writings about him. Powers lays these to rest with gentle, if firm, dismissals. Like any man, Clemens had his faults and foibles. His failures at business are the stuff of legend, but it was an era of freebooting capitalism. No vaccine had been developed to inoculate the innocent, and innocence was considered a virtue in Clemens' time. Powers carefully relates how "Sammy" who wanted to live forever on the Mississippi River, was snatched away from a life of absolute power - no-one dared challenge a steamboat pilot - to partake of an era for which he had no briefing. From the childhood on the River, dominated by his austere father and religious mother, Sam Clemens moved across America to avoid the conflict he had no taste for. The escape to Nevada and the Comstock opened many opportunities for discovery. His own Mother Lode turned out to be people. Powers follows Clemens on his prospecting for personalities. The mining ventures, the reporter's role and world travel each produced their own literary nuggets. In a time without jets or SUVs, Clemens' voyages seem almost astonishing. Yet every trip and their stops provided fresh nuggets he would refine and reproduce for our delight. Powers shows that the portrayals are far more than just "reporting" on the Western way of life. They are harbingers of what was making the United States Powers' view of his subject avoids the popular form of "deep" analysis. Instead, he demonstrates how far-reaching Twain's views proved. He found his nation's imperialist ventures abhorrent, and Powers' presentation of it is subtly topical. He uses Clemens' voice for his own - "he made a book of a Paige" referring to the aftermath of the bankruptcy would be a perfect Twain aphorism. Powers carefully analyses Clemens' writing prowess, noting both strengths and weaknesses with professional candor. "Huckleberry Finn", considered by many to be the greatest of the novels, takes a sharp turn in Powers view. The "break", he says, follows the "Wagnerian aria" of Huck's damning himself for protecting Jim's identity. Following that event, the biographer condem

Imagine if you will someone who is a mixture, on the one hand, of Voltaire and Nietzsche, and, on the other hand, of Andy Rooney, Steve Martin, Woody Allen, and Will Rogers, and you will get some idea of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), "the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope" and "the Lincoln of American Literature," a man known as Mark Twain. In Mark Twain: A Life, Ron Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and critic who has studied and written about Mark Twain for many years (his published work includes Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain), has written a top-echelon biography of "the representative figure of his times." Powers' project was to write a narrative of Twain's life and works that explains what bound Twain and his half of the American 19th century so closely together, and to explain the liberating personal magnetism that Twain possessed that moved his contemporaries to forgive him for traits and tendencies that biographers of a later time have found deplorable. "Twainian critical literature from 1920 onward," writes Powers, "has been dominated by theory, rather than interpretive portraiture. 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." Drawing heavily on the preserved viewpoints of the people who knew him best, Powers seeks to rediscover Mark Twain the human being, as he lived, breathed, and wrote. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has drawn on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered. Powers' expertise in the field of literary criticism is seen as he describes the conception and execution of Twain's major works (listed here in their order of publication): The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches; The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It; The Gilded Age (with Charles Dudley Warner); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; A Tramp Abroad; The Prince and the Pauper; Life on the Mississippi; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The American Claimant; Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc; Tom Sawyer, Detective; Following the Equator; Eve's Diary; and Letters from the Earth. Powers points out that Twain characteristically used the narrative technique of a frame story--a main story that seeks to organize a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. Twain's strong suit as a writer, he asserts, was not tightly organized plots with logical connections and transitions; his genius lay in a free-flowing style that carved out new islands of prose, much like the wild. wide-ranging Mississippi River that periodically overflowed its banks. Although Twain lacked formal training in rhetoric and literature, he was a voracious re

The first great advantage of this book is that it gives the reader the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the presence of an enormously complicated, interesting and humorous character , Mark Twain. A second advantage is that it does this by giving a detailed description of the time and world in which Twain lived in. It takes the reader through the wandering Twain's adventures in America , and as an innocent abroad. It relates turning point moments in Twain's life in a dramatic way, as for instance his meeting with William Dean Howells in the Atlantic's office in Boston, a meeting which not only open a forty- one year old friendship but pave the way for Twain's acceptance by the New England Literary culture which dominated American Letters. Powers also gives insight into the unique genius of Twain. There is a wonderful paragraph in which he describes the child's gift for hearing and seeing in unusual ways. And how this gift would totally transform American literature bringing into the colloquial voices of so many different American worlds. There have been other very good biographies of Mark Twain but this one in its most detailed reading of the life is a real contribution to our understanding of America's greatest comic writer.