Ron Chernow’s “Mark Twain” is a mountain of a book. As Mark Twain is one of my all-time favorites — and probably the most important and influential writer who put words into my brain — I couldn’t wait to get it. That was months ago. But at 1,037 pages or so, it was a tough climb.

Working on a just-about daily Substack as well as a lengthy book on Neil Young (94,000 words at the moment) – the guy just keeps releasing more music every damn day – it left me little time to saddle up with Twain here at the fort.

So, for a couple of baseball-related plane trips to Texas and Kansas City, Kansas, I carried it in my backpack and read it on the planes going and coming. But finally, I decided the five-pound book was too damn heavy to bring with me on my visit to the Midwest. With the end in sight, I sat in a Books A Million in Kansas City, Kansas on Labor Day, appropriately, and got a store copy and read to the finish. And by the end, I was glad I wasn’t Mark Twain.

This was news to me. I’d read Ron Powers’ bio of Twain, watched Ken Burns’ series on Twain — watched it again just the other day — saw Hal Holbrook do “Mark Twain Tonight” in person four times, had the record album and the video tape, played it in class for the kids, wrote a book about my experiences teaching Mark Twain at an African-American school (“Teaching Huck Finn” still available on Amazon and available at the Mark Twain House!) and read and taught all kinds of Twain stuff over the years. So it wasn’t like I didn’t already know about the guy, his life and his work.

But when you’re wading through “Twain” and you read about his right writing arm so plagued with rheumatism that he took hours-long treatments to try to cure him, then forcing himself to learn to write left-handed to get the words down that he just had to get out, him suffering with excruciating, recurring bouts with gout and other health maladies, couldn’t ever seem to shrug off this accursed chase of money with knuckleheaded business deals one right after the other — “I was never able to recognize an opportunity until it ceased to be one” — as well as the endless, heart-wrenching, succession of family health problems that close the book, for his devoted, saintly wife Livy (Olivia) who had heart failure and other ailments, daughters Susy, Clara and Jean (Susy died of meningitis at 24, Clara had a nervous breakdown, Jean died of an epileptic seizure in the bathtub), it was the kind of life that just reading about wore you down. How in the world he could find a way to write something funny, insightful, thoughtful with all the moaning in the background had to be a dad-blamed miracle.

The role of a biographer, ideally, is to bring that person back to life on the page. And at times, Chernow is able to do that since Twain wrote and wrote and wrote and his wife and daughters wrote back and to others and this was all preserved. Some of it is funny, some is nasty, some of it sad and reading Chernow dutifully finding one thing, then another, you’re immersed in what must have been an endlessly churning, ever-changing, restless, unsettled life with an unrelenting, unpredictable personality that was not only unable but unwilling to keep quiet. If reading this kind of thing for much of 1,037 pages is exhausting, imagine living it. No wonder they all had health problems.

This posed a considerable problem for a biographer, who had or found all this material available, felt it helped reveal a life unlike any other, yet ultimately, didn’t seem to understand that it shrouded the Mark Twain everybody wanted to read about, the first American smart-ass, wit, sharp-tongued, take-no-prisoners commentator on our times. There isn’t a lot of literary analysis or commentary here, maybe because there is no way to explain a Mark Twain any more than you can explain a Shakespeare.

Some of the critics were disappointed that Chernow went for what some would see as minutiae instead of a grander portrait. Writing in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood wrote: “Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores.”

Writing for Prospect, Princeton educator Rhodri Lewis didn’t like Chernow’s writing style. “Although (Chernow) remains readable in the best tradition of American reportage, he too often walks a line between the tautologous, the pleonastic and the exhaustedly purple: truths are “untrammelled”, spells are “wondrous”, touchstones are “magical”, seriousness is “deadly”, critiques are “profound”, loyalties are “fierce”, happiness is “unalloyed”, hatreds are “implacable”, sadnesses are “ineffable”, and so on. All of these from the first nine pages of text. Striving for a certain grandeur, Chernow attains an over-copious automaticity that is the opposite of what one finds in Twain; think of a love letter written by an imperfect AI programme.”

What is a writer to do, attempting to summarize the life of someone who, most would say, was so much his better? You can’t adopt his style, yet how can you ignore it? In recent interviews, Chernow admitted finding the correct writing style for Twain was difficult.

In Literary Review, Edward Short suggests why Twain’s depth remains elusive and almost inexplicable. “Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did. Moreover, (T.S.) Eliot is altogether right that ‘there is in Twain … a great unconscious depth, which gives to Huckleberry Finn … a symbolism all the more powerful for being uncalculated and unconscious’. Readers of Twain’s masterpiece have notoriously been at odds as to its import, some regarding it as racist and others as a thoroughgoing denunciation of racism. But if we take Eliot’s point – that ‘the Mississippi of Mark Twain is not only the river known to those who voyage on it or live beside it, but the universal river of human life’ – it follows that we need some account of Twain’s own voyage on that ‘universal river’. “

In other words, the “universal river” that Twain traversed, all he saw and felt and wrote about can’t really be recaptured by a biographer. Twain already did it.

Writing in Washington’s Independent Review of books, Karl Straub offered a pithy summary: “If Twain were alive to read this book, or to lift it, he might wonder aloud how many people would actually survive the trip from one cover to the other.”

Somehow, Mark Twain did and wrote about it for us. It’s all still there. Read him.

John Nogowski is a former Connecticut resident, author and sports writer. His book, “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography 1961-2022” is available online at Amazon.

https://www.courant.com/2025/10/11/opinion-we-all-need-to-keep-reading-mark-twain/