About the Book
Twain's story is epic, comic and tragic. To retrace it all in illuminating detail, Powers draws on the tens of thousands of Twain's letters and on his astonishing journal entries - many of which are quoted here for the first time. Twain left Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats, enjoyed an uproariously drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West, and witnessed and joined the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and of the Gilded Age. Through it all he observed, borrowed, stole and combined the characters he met into the voice of America's greatest literature, attracting throngs of fans wherever his undying lust for wandering took him. From Twain's wicked satire to his relationships with the likes of Ulysses Grant, this is a brilliantly written story that astounds, amuses and edifies as only a great life can.
About the Author :
Ron Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and critic, has studied and written about Mark Twain for many years. He is the author of ten books, including Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, and the coauthor of two, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Flags of Our Fathers. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
Review :
'Ron Powers has written as good an account of the "Lincoln of American Literature" as one could desire ... the book is, on the whole, a joy, and I'd be surprised if anyone who, on reading the moving narrative of Mark Twain's death in the final chapter, did not feel his eyes run over' THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 22/01 'Irascible, petulant, charming, demanding, gregarious, talented, lazy: Powers riffs nicely on the similarities between Twain and present-day rock stars (right down to trashing hotel rooms). Democracy, gadgetry, capitalism and superstardom coalesed in the person of Twain, just as they came to be seen as the definining characteristics of the country' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'This is a vivid portrait of a writer who cheated death twice - once a sickly frontier babe and more famously as a celebrated author whose death was "an exaggeration" ... This tale grips as well as any novel, for the "American Shakespeare's" life was in turn epic, comic and tragic' BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE FEB MAGAZINE "My books are simply autobiographies," Mark Twain once confessed. True of most American writers, it seems especially true of a man who, as Ron Powers argues in this magisterial biography, "found a voice for his country"' LITERARY REVIEW FEB ISSUE 'The special joy of Ron Powers' TWAIN is not just that it's comprehensive but also that it places this great novel and its author in their proper historical context, and shows how life and work played against each other ... In this essential life, the two are brought together with an authority and understanding that is rare' OBSERVER, Robert McCrum 'As Ron Powers' superb biography explains, Twain was an extremely unlikely candidate for literary stardom ... yet more than any other writer of his day, he captured the voice and spirit of a country only beginning to realise its cultural and political strength ... In Powers, Twain has finally found a biographer with the scope to do him justice. This is a wonderfully rich, resonant book, steeped in scholarship but written with an eager enthusiasm that makes it a joy to read' TELEGRAPH 4/2 'It's hard to think of a worthier biography than this mainly because there is nothinng worthy about it. Powers tells the story with that uniquely American poise between the savvy and the cerebral, the literary and the populist, action and reflection. A stately, judicious rendering of Clemen's life would be an unnatural thing, and this is not what we get ... That Powers, a Pulitzer prizewinner, has produced such a resonant account confirms that reports that reports of Mark Twain's death have indeed been exaggerated and that, for all the occasional evidence to the contrary in contemporary America, his spirit is still alive' NEW STATESMAN 6/2 'Twain, by channelling the new energies, social conflicts and speech forms emerging in the United States, ended the reign of its Eurotropic establishment and set American literature on a new, independent course' SCOTSMAN 28/01 'A formidable grasp of the vast, tangled jungle of Twain scholarship, a second-to-none knowledge of the provincial newspapers and Wild West mining towns and mushrooming seaboard cities that were Twain's habitat, and a prodigious fund of anecdote. The result is required reading not just for Twain addicts but for anyone who would like to know how modern America happened' Sunday Times 12/2 'The facts, which Powers states briskly and clearly, with striking quotations from letters and diaries, many published for the first time, make this a book that pelts along, its vivid characters inspiring laughter, horror and pity' Evening Standard 14/2 'Who was Mark Twain? On our side of the Atlantic we think of him as the author of a couple of imperishable boys' adventures -- those of Tom Sawyer and his uncivilisable friend Huckleberry Finn, the picturesque chronicler of the life on the Mississippi river in the days of the early 19th century. But over there he is a national monument; not only the most famous American author of his time, but perhaps of all time. Hemingway (his only rival in international popularity) wrote that all modern American literature traced back to Huckleberry Finn, which has sold more than 20 million copies...This exhaustive and enthusiastic biography gives a finely detailed and colourful picture of the rough, tough society of the American South and West before the civil war' Daily Mail 17/2 'An immensely readable biography of America's most famous writer, charting his extremely colouful life from his boyhood in frontier Missouri in the 1840s through to his death in 1910' FT MAGAZINE (SUMMER READING) 17/06 'Ron Powers' capacious and scholarly biography is a portrait not just of a man but of a country entering what Twain called its Gilded Age - "new machines, mushrooming cities, proliferating railroads". At its centre was Twain, giving shape to the national myth. Showman, comedian, political manoeuvrer, pornographer, doubter, Twain was America's first literary celebrity' SUMMER READING IN DAILY TELEGRAPH, 24/06 'Powers' exhaustive biography charts his rise from humble riverboat pilot to doyen of American letters' Mail on Sunday 1/4 'Powers brings enthusiasm and depth of understanding to this richly enjoyable portrait' Independent 9/3 'Powers argues that his predecessors tend to be "scholarly critics" in whose efforts the human being, [Twain's] voice and humour go missing. This Pulitzer prize-winning life captivatingly succeeds where they failed, finding a way of writing that is coloured by Twain's verbal larkiness but never merely imitates him' Guardian 10/3 'There is nothing jaded or recycled about Ron Powers's masterly portrait... He does justice to a comic, tragic, inspiring American life, and the reader shares his unwillingness to let go when it is time for Twain to die in the final, heart-stopping paragraph' Paperback of the Week, Observer 11/3
