Mark Twain

In this sweeping 1,200-page biography, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ron Chernow delivers a richly detailed and unflinching portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemens—Mark Twain—as both America’s greatest humorist and its first true literary celebrity. Drawing on vast archival materials, Chernow traces Twain’s journey from a steamboat pilot and mischievous Missouri youth to a nationally renowned satirist, lecturer, and raconteur, while exploring his towering literary achievements like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi alongside his relentless pursuit of fame, financial misadventures, and deeply personal tragedies. Chernow doesn’t shy away from Twain’s moral contradictions—his critiques of slavery and yet silence on lynching, his late-life fixation on young “angel-fish,” and his performative flamboyance—offering a complex, nuanced figure shaped as much by genius as by vulnerability. This biography sets a new standard for Twain scholarship: immersive, honest, and uncommonly comprehensive.