Was Mark Twain (1835–1910) a Southern writer? He was born into a slaveholding family in Missouri, joined a Confederate militia during the Civil War, and often wrote about the South, most famously in his masterful Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most folks nowadays—picturing the drawling Twain in his white linen suit, like a bookish Colonel Sanders—would answer yes. But Twain’s contemporaries didn’t think so, nor did scholars for half a century after his death. The 1895 Southern Literature: From 1579–1895, for example, inventoried nine hundred writers, but Twain wasn’t among them. Likewise, the Library of Southern Literature (1907) couldn’t find room for a mention in its original fourteen volumes and 6,560 pages. The editors of The Literature of the South (1952) tried explaining his absence thisaway: “Although the South molded Twain and gave him his literary background, it did not retain him.”
That’s an exquisitely dry way of saying that Mark Twain and the South had a falling-out. But it’s just one of countless splintered relationships Ron Chernow chronicles in Mark Twain, the first major biography in a generation of the author, raconteur, crusader, gadfly, protocelebrity, and, in Chernow’s words, “born-again Yankee.” Chernow has always been drawn to larger-than-life emblems of Americana: Washington, Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Hamilton (his bio of whom laid the foundation for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical). Reviewers tend to call his books “magisterial” because they are. With Twain, Chernow set his sights on, in his words, “the biggest literary personality that America has produced,” with one of the most eventful, hurly-burly lives of any American author.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain grew up in a backwater river town in Missouri. After stints as a printer, riverboat pilot, and silver miner and newspaperman out West, he began writing books, first humorous reports from the hinterland and later, with Huckleberry Finn and The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, full-on excavations of the national conscience. Unlike many authors, Twain rarely stayed put. Chernow tags along from Hannibal to Hartford to Hawaii to the Holy Land and beyond, with Twain pinballing from side hustle to side hustle (as a public speaker, publisher, and inept investor, among others) and burning through friendships and business partnerships.
Those external complexities, however, were but a fraction of those roiling inside Twain. His contradictions, Chernow writes, make him a “fascinating, maddening puzzle.” He was a renowned funnyman wracked by guilts and black moods; a satirist of schemers and hucksters who repeatedly fell prey to them; a champion of the common man who craved the high life (one friend called him a “theoretical socialist and practical aristocrat”); a Confederate militiaman (albeit briefly) who later hobnobbed with Union generals, published Grant’s memoirs, and moved next door to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe; and a doting father to three daughters and proponent of women’s rights and suffrage who in his widowed seventies developed an obsession with teen girls, calling them “angelfish” and surrounding himself with them as often as possible. (No evidence exists that Twain was anything but chaste with them, but the ick factor is off the charts.) His vanity scraped against self-deprecation (“high & fine literature is wine, & mine is only water,” he wrote. “But everybody likes water”).
Among Twain’s constants, however, was his adult-onset abhorrence of slavery and racism. That, along with what he saw as the region’s cringey Lost Cause mythology, triggered his breakup with the South, though he bore warm affection for aspects of it until his death. (A housekeeper later said, “He loved the Mississippi almost as much as he loved a person,” and never stopped talking about it.) Twain disdained institutional morality but, like his creations Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, recognized the difference between right and wrong. As he had Tom put it: “A body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”
As what Chernow calls a “conscience of American society,” Twain grew disillusioned in his twilight years; idealists often do. “One can’t write a book unless he can banish perplexities,” Twain complained, yet his very achievement lay in amalgamating a nation’s perplexities—its virtues and sins, aspirations and derelictions, comedy and tragedy—into not just books, but a life.
More new reads: Nature meets nurture in a dazzling new memoir
Martha Park’s unforgettable World Without End (Hub City) is a master class on how sharing the most particular and personal details can have the ironic effect of revealing universal truths. She does so through beautiful essays and illustrations: a pastor father; a Tennessee upbringing; a Kentucky husband; a fascination with the powers of water, electricity, growth, and loss. By narrowing in on her childhood memories and questions about motherhood, and then zooming out to gorgeous observations of the South’s mountains and coasts, she asks, as perhaps we all do, how to find a foothold in the wilds of life. —CJ Lotz Diego
Garden & Gun has affiliate partnerships and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a product. All products are independently selected by the G&G editorial team.
