What The Hell America!

In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon. The penultimate book that Twain published in his lifetime, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), asked his readers to consider how few solid biographical details existed about Shakespeare the man, and how much critics had inferred from so little. They had built, Twain wrote, “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.”

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. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.

Twain bequeathed to history much more than “a signature or two.” In addition to a whole archive of notebooks, articles, and unpublished or unfinished manuscripts, he dictated half a million words of autobiography, and he appeared in public so often that even if he’d never written or dictated anything, many thousands of others could have supplied accounts of his existence. Chernow is the latest in a long line of biographers undaunted by this surplus of Twainiana (a line so long, in fact, that he is not even the only recent biographer named Ron).

Chernow is not a literary scholar—he is best known for his lives of American political, military, and business figures—which may explain his relative neglect of Twain’s literary output (more than 30 books published in his lifetime, and thousands of additional pages to keep the printers busy more than a century later). The biography contains no new interpretations of Twain’s novels, nor much to explain the splendid originality of his travel writing. Instead, Chernow devotes a hefty portion of his 1,039 pages (excluding notes) to Twain’s personal tribulations, a depressing series of bungles and calamities starting in the author’s middle age.

Twain’s exposure to bad ideas had begun much earlier. His father, the lawyer and judge John Marshall Clemens, had sunk the family’s money into land in Tennessee, and though the plan went nowhere, the impulse toward wild speculation seems to have imprinted on young Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Later Sam was, Chernow says, “blinded by greed,” and convinced beyond evidence and reason that his schemes would eventually succeed. In fact, the Clemens family, having settled in Hannibal, Missouri, grew poorer. Perhaps more important, Twain’s childhood unfolded in a part of the country soon to be defeated and never to recover fully during his lifetime.

Read: Mark Twain’s work from The Atlantic’s archive

The four years of his early 20s that he spent as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi were nevertheless an idyll. “The older and more famous he became and the grander his horizons,” Chernow says, “the more he pined for the vanished paradise of his early years.” An occupational hazard of writing about Twain is that the subject always finds a way to preempt his biographer and say it better himself. Even if Twain cannot be bested, he can still be quoted, and Chernow does so liberally. On a brief return to the river in 1882, Twain wrote that he indulged in the “dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care‑free as I had been twenty years before.”

Twain’s journalism eventually brought him riches. Happiness was permanently elusive. The most remarkable aspect of his southern youth is how decisively he abandoned it, first at the age of 25, to go out West as a newspaperman in Nevada, and later to reside in New York, Connecticut, and Europe as an established writer. The Mark Twain closely associated with Hannibal rarely returned to it.

At 34, for love and money, Twain married into a wealthy abolitionist family and settled in Hartford. “I never saw any place where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here,” he said. (According to Michael Patrick Hearn’s magisterial annotated 2001 edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain never saw a huckleberry until he moved to Hartford. Huckleberries and morality are equally scarce there today.) His newlywed days, Chernow writes, were “the happiest period of his life.” With money, part of it his wife’s, Twain began to live “like a mogul,” Chernow notes, “without the slightest trace of guilt.”

Twain’s first big success, The Innocents Abroad (1869), was written while accompanying American pilgrims to Europe and the Holy Land. It is the seminal and unsurpassed work of American travel writing. The country had declared its political independence in 1776, and Ralph Waldo Emerson had declared its intellectual independence in 1837. The Innocents Abroad is written with a new curiosity and sass, unburdened by any lingering sense of inferiority to Europe. It is also, in its treatment of Twain’s fellow passengers (“philistine killjoys,” Chernow calls them), freighted with the question of who these newly independent people are, and what—if not vassals of the Old World—they should be. The book sold better than anything else Twain wrote, and it established a steady revenue stream from the lecture circuit for the rest of his life.

Twain needed to leave a place in order to come back to it, and the greatest case of productive exile was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). It was written over seven years. The main value of learning about Twain’s life during its composition is the discovery of just how estranged from his youth he had become. He wrote his memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883) during the same period, and the two books gestated together as fraternal twins. Twain had found that the romance of the river had dissipated, and could be summoned only in memory and dreams. In Huckleberry Finn, what appears to be romantic nostalgia is in fact the death of the romantic instinct and shedding of defunct fantasies. By the time he began writing the novel, Twain had given up on the South and transformed permanently from barefoot Missouri rascal into rich and famous New Englander. The glorious opening of Chapter 19, about the Mississippi passing by “so quiet and smooth and lovely,” is a poetic vision evoked only so that Twain can then evoke its loss: not passing by so much as passing away. The end of that illusion had left Twain spiritually homeless, just as it left Huck’s conscience untethered, and the boy himself adrift with the fugitive slave Jim.

Chernow at times seems almost afraid of applying too much interpretation to Twain’s writing—as if aware that literary criticism is not his sport, and that he is better off when recounting names, dates, locations, and events. He is, however, unsparing when Twain evades hard questions. Twain’s transformation from southerner to northerner was never complete. He married a northerner and settled in the North. But Chernow shows that the extent of his former prejudice, as a product of the South, was greater than one might presume, given Twain’s later eminence as an opponent of racism. Twain’s early writing and private letters and diaries contain vile language and sentiments. “For all the progress Twain made in his racial awareness, he never achieved perfection,” Chernow writes. “Racial epithets could still pop up in his letters with dismaying frequency.”

From the April 2024 issue: A bloody retelling of Huckleberry Finn

During the Civil War, Twain saw brief, ineffectual combat in a Confederate militia. He atoned for this service by making grand gestures of solidarity with the Union he’d once fought. He became such a friend of the North that he was “the speaker of choice for many Union army reunions.” Chernow doesn’t doubt the sincerity of Twain’s conversion, but he sees where Twain’s humor can be a form of deflection. When he wrote about his war record in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885), he ridiculed himself and mocked war in general. But the self-deprecation avoided a full reckoning with the moral abomination of the Confederacy—about which he says nothing specific. Chernow calls this deflection “the sure sign of an unresolved conflict” in Twain, and deems the essay “unsatisfying because it is devoid of any political or ideological content.”

Twain grew up hankering for money, but the money arrived when he could take little satisfaction from it. He is the funniest writer America has ever produced, and Chernow has an awful task as a biographer, which is to portray him from midlife onward as a suffering wreck. “What any biography of Mark Twain demands is his inimitable voice,” he writes. The Twain of the printed page is irreverent and quotable, but the private Twain is petulant, self-pitying, narcissistic, and afflicted with tragedy and misery of his own making and of God’s. Mark Twain is funny. Mark Twain is funny the way the Book of Job is funny.

If the life of William S. Burroughs is the sum of his addictions, and the life of Norman Mailer the sum of his quarrels, then the life of Mark Twain could be told by listing what Chernow calls his “lifelong fantasies of king‑size wealth and countless schemes to attain it.” These schemes nearly all tanked, and often ended in recrimination. Twain was “insanely litigious” in his efforts to seek recompense when he imagined himself wronged, as he often did, including in petty disputes with his own publishers. The late 19th century was a boom time for mad inventors, scam artists, and fast-talking salesmen. Twain was defenseless before the promises of these types.

His credulity led to misadventures the details of which are so picayune that Chernow’s emphasis on them can be maddening. Only when one realizes how much time and energy Twain himself devoted to the boondoggles does the emphasis feel merited. Twain invented ridiculous devices that no one wanted (“a bed clamp that would prevent children from kicking off their blankets; a vest that would require no suspenders”). He created awful board games. “Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder” was meant to help the player remember dates, using pegs in a cribbage-like board. “The forbidding‑looking board,” Chernow writes, “had all the allure of a railway schedule.” Chernow quotes such thrilling details as Twain’s specifications for the proper depths of the peg holes (“about a quarter of an inch”). Twain’s quest to get the peg depth right distracted him from the timely completion of Huckleberry Finn.

From the April 1897 issue: Mark Twain as an interpreter of American character

Twain’s biggest blunder was an investment in the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine that he thought would become the industry standard. Starting in 1880, he slowly blew his family’s savings on it. He relentlessly hyped it to investors as “the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man,” and its creator, James W. Paige, as “the Shakespeare of mechanical invention.” His judgment about this mechanical Shakespeare was as impaired as his later judgment of the actual Shakespeare. The machine never worked—at one point it was declared functional, but on closer inspection it could not typeset a period at the end of a sentence—and this failure provoked constant stress. Twain and his loved ones became, Chernow writes, financial “captives of the monstrous machine.” Even upon realizing that one scheme had come to nothing, Twain would promptly embark on another. He begged Andrew Carnegie to invest in a drink called Plasmon—little more than reconstituted skim milk—and claimed that a pound of Plasmon powder “contains the nutriment of 16 pounds of the best beef.”

The world tour that became the basis for Twain’s second-best travel book, Following the Equator (1897), was undertaken to settle debts due to the failure of the Paige Compositor investment. But mostly the financial hardship did not spur him to write more. Instead it drained his morale and delayed or diminished his work. It is as if Philip Roth cut back on writing novels during the 1990s to devote himself to selling SlimFast and creating an alternative to Microsoft Word. Twain knew that his schemes had become a problem. Everyone knew. Chernow quotes a Washington Post article suggesting that a sane investor should watch Twain, and do the opposite—but he was incorrigible. “I quite understand that I am confessing myself a fool,” he wrote, when recounting the Paige Compositor scheme. “But that is no matter, the reader would find it out anyway, as I go along.”

Reading this narrative, I cringed plenty but laughed out loud only once. In the early 1890s, Twain visited the scientific workshop of the Serbian eccentric Nikola Tesla. Tesla had built a platform that “shook with pleasing vibrations” and allegedly offered therapeutic effects as well as (he warned) occasional involuntary laxative ones. “After Twain had stood on the platform awhile, Tesla discreetly nudged him to dismount,” Chernow writes. Twain, having much too good a time, repeatedly declined, “then stiffened with sudden alarm.” If there is a more wonderful literary anecdote than Twain—let us imagine him wearing his trademark white serge suit—jiggling in a mad scientist’s lab while soiling his pants, I have yet to read it.

Would that all life could be filled with such tomfoolery. Twain’s final decades were his Job years, the opposite of quiet and smooth and lovely. Twain’s wife, Olivia Langdon, bore him four children, only one of whom escaped a wretched end. Throughout their marriage, Olivia was intermittently bedridden, with a nervous illness that Chernow and other biographers suggest was psychosomatic. Twain’s only son died of diphtheria at 18 months, and Twain unfairly blamed himself. (He had taken the boy on a carriage ride in cold weather.) His daughter Susy died at 24 of meningitis. Olivia died in 1904. Their daughter Jean suffered from chronic epileptic seizures, for which Twain tirelessly sought, and never found, effective treatment. In 1909, Jean was found dead in a cold bath at 29.

“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,” Francis Bacon wrote, under his own name, with Twainian pith. These agonizing deaths were made, if anything, worse by Twain’s fame and money problems. Olivia’s family’s wealth gave him not one but two fortunes to squander, and her family’s religious conservatism made the possibility of bankruptcy a moral as well as fiscal event. In 1891, the family’s accounts had so declined that they had to move out of their Hartford mansion. They spent more than a decade traveling in Europe, seeking cures for their illnesses and hoping for a reversal of luck that never came. In 1906, when dictating his autobiography and commenting on a friend’s death, Twain said that life is “a tragedy; with a dash of comedy distributed through it, here and there, to heighten the pain and magnify it, by contrast.”

These final years are sometimes treated as a lost period, because Twain’s writing grew bitter and cynical and unpalatable to those more interested in pleasing escapades. “Mark Twain had given the world laughter and now had gotten only misery in return,” Chernow writes. Twain has long been accused of giving Huck Finn an overly pat, comic ending. His later work does not suffer from this problem. Even A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which starts like an adolescent adventure, ends with its hero, Hank Morgan, broken and demoralized, and his family lost.

Yet the morbid final phase of Twain’s writing, though always less popular (in part because much of it was unpublished during his life), is to my taste still sublime. Chernow follows the pattern of most biographers in giving this work less attention than the more chipper earlier books—which is a pity, because the later work also reflects the Twain best illuminated by Chernow’s biography and its emphasis on Twain’s most forlorn years.

“I have no special regard for Satan,” Chernow quotes Twain remarking, “but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show.” By then Twain had several reasons to believe that both his favor toward Satan and Olivia’s favor toward God were unreciprocated. Nearly all the gifts showered upon them had morphed into curses: The wealth vanished, the children were struck dead, and the fame transformed into shame. After Susy died suddenly in 1896, Twain wrote an essay, quoted at length by Chernow, about the sick trickery of the Almighty. “He never does a kindness. When He seems to do one, it is a trap which He is setting,” Twain writes. “He gives you riches, merely as a trap; it is to quadruple the bitterness of the poverty which He has planned for you.”

From the August 1966 issue: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Mark Twain

This streak of anti-theodicy is the engine of Twain’s posthumous novel, The Mysterious Stranger (1916). Twain had abandoned in manuscript several chilling tales, later stitched together by his official biographer, Albert Paine. Set hundreds of years ago in Austria, they involve encounters between children and a wandering figure who reveals himself, nonchalantly, as Satan. Satan is a lover of strangeness and coincidence—of exposing the happiness of humans as a prelude to their misery, and sometimes their misery as a prelude to happiness. With a shrug, he will grant wishes or cause misfortune. Those who meet him achieve an unwanted enlightenment about their place in the world.

Twain concludes one version of the story with the mortal narrator’s recognition that the contradictions of existence are so “frankly and hysterically insane” that the world must be amiss. How “strange,” Satan tells the narrator, that he could believe in a God “who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body”—and not see that the only world that could accommodate these discrepancies is “a grotesque and foolish dream.” Then Satan vanishes, abandoning the narrator in a measureless ocean of space and time. He “left me appalled,” the book ends, “for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.”

This exchange forms a disorienting end to a disorienting book—and indeed a disorienting life. Chernow claims that The Mysterious Stranger “ultimately sags beneath the weight of Twain’s grievances, obsessions, and dogmatic opinions.” But Chernow’s own book is evidence that Twain earned his grievances, obsessions, and dogmatic opinions. It is cruelly ironic that Twain, the foremost American dealer in irony, would himself be tortured by ironies: blessings that turn out to be curses, curses that turn out to be blessings; Cassandra-like ability to see stupidity in others, but failure to detect the same in himself.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “The Not at All Funny Life of Mark Twain.”