Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography
by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan

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Book Reviews of Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography

Book Review: A Great Book For Twain Fans
Summary: 5 Stars

Part of Twain's greatness is that he was a man of enormous talent and en­ergy who was in the right places at the right times. It was the perfect combination that made him a uniquely American artist. Talent without energy would not have given him the ability to write so much. Ener­gy without talent would not have made him, as Russel Banks' words, a wise guy who was wise. American letters is full of humorists who are now footnotes. In Twain's time, there is P.V. Nasby, and Josh Billings, Bret Harte and Arte­mus Ward. What makes Twain so different?

First, Twain saw himself as more than a humorist. He was a moralist. He was perfect­ly capable of writing funny without a point, whether it be about a trick played with a jumping frog, or the stories about Tom Sawyer. But he also used Huck Finn to rage against slavery. He berated Commo­dore Vanderbilt for not using his millions to help the poor (he later hob­nobbed with the rich, one of those contradictions that en­riches his character). Later in life, embittered by the death of his children, he abandoned hu­mor to rail against imperial­ism, lynching and even God.

Written by Burns' collabora­tors Dayton Duncan and Geof­frey C. Ward, "Mark Twain" is crammed full of stories that show us the man behind the penname. Twain boiled with mirth, resentment, anger and passion, both on and off the page. When a button was found missing from one of his freshly-laundered shirts, he cursed and threw the whole stack out of the window of his home. On the lecture circuit, he gloried in leaving his audiences helpless with laughter.

But his sorrow was equally powerful. When he lost the love of his life, his wife, Livy, he wrote, "There is no God and no universe; . . . there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And . . . I am that thought."

But as Twain helped define the nation with his writings, the nation also defined him. He planted him­self deep into the rich soil of the South, the West and the East, and drew upon all those sources for his work. He grew up in Hannibal, Mis­souri, on the stories told by whites and blacks. His became a riverboat pilot, intimately aware of the power and beauty of the Mississippi River. He avoided fighting in the Civil War - for which he was never chastised, partly because he was so willing to make fun of himself over it - and worked as a newspaperman and failed silver miner in Nevada and San Francisco. Seeking success as a writer, he went East where the publishers were, and settled in Hartford, Conn. As his fame grew and he traveled world­wide, he brought home more tales to tell, but they all had a source in common: humanity in all its rich glories and taw­dry foibles.

"Mark Twain" briskly charts Twain's incredible life, and in­cludes essays by writers like Banks and Jocelyn Chadwick and an interview with Twain impersonator Hal Holbrook that are entertaining and illu­minating. Interwoven in the text are Twain's own words, so many that he should have re­ceived co-author credit.

But the book's crowning glory are in its photo­graphs, many of them never published. This is the strongest rea­son any Twain fan should look at the book. It's an incredible selection. Here he is at the breakfast table during his round-the-world lecture tour he took at age 60, looking like he just got out of bed (which he did). There, he's on the stage, "lending tone" to a lecture by Booker T. Washington.

And one of the saddest ap­proaches art. It was taken in 1900, and after several deaths (a son in infancy, one daughter four years before), and the family is down to his daughters Jean, Clara and his wife, Livy. Jean was away, so the picture only shows Twain, Livy and Clara. They're there, but they're not part of the picture; they look in different directions as if they can't bear to be there. He's looking at the camera, in soft focus, unable to stand still for a moment. As if their grief had a physical presence, the glass photo is cracked. It is a portrait of a family slowly colliding with tragedy.

By the end of his life, Twain had had enough. He was ready to go out with the return of Ha­ley's Comet in 1910. At his fu­neral, his unique stature in lit­erature was recognized by his good friend, Joe Twitchell, who called him, "the Lincoln of our literature."

"I am not an American, I am the American," Twain said, and "Mark Twain" shows how he became our most American writer.

Summary of Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography

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• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature
• Literature & Fiction > United States > History & Criticism