Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
by Justin Kaplan
Summary
Justin Kaplan's biography opens not with Samuel Clemens's 1835 birth in Florida, Missouri, but with the thirty one year old man home from four months reporting on the Sandwich Islands in 1866, already using the pen name Mark Twain, and already showing the split Kaplan builds the whole book around, between a Missouri raised humorist still finding his voice and the man of letters he was working, deliberately, to become. From that unconventional opening the biography loops back to cover the material more chronological biographies open with, his apprenticeship as a printer after his father's death, his years training as a Mississippi riverboat pilot under Horace Bixby, a career the outbreak of the Civil War ended by shutting down river traffic, and his move west to Nevada, where mining failed him and journalism did not.
The book follows his 1870 marriage to Olivia Langdon, whose wealthy but reform minded family introduced him to abolitionists and reformers far removed from his Missouri childhood, and it follows the major books that made his reputation, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Kaplan treats less as childhood entertainments than as the clearest expression of the tension between Twain's comic public voice and Clemens's more troubled private one. It follows the couple's losses, their son Langdon's death from diphtheria before his second birthday, and Clemens's increasingly reckless investing, above all in the Paige typesetting machine, which helped drive him into bankruptcy in 1894 despite substantial earnings from his writing and lecturing. The biography follows his subsequent worldwide lecture tour, undertaken to repay creditors he had no legal obligation to satisfy, as the clearest single act of the moral seriousness Kaplan argues lived underneath the humorist's public persona, and it closes with Clemens's death in 1910, one day after Halley's Comet, whose 1835 appearance had coincided with his birth, made its closest approach to the sun.
Kaplan draws the book's real argument from that opening structural choice, that a man who invented a persona as durable as Mark Twain never fully escaped the distance between the performer and the person underneath him.
Historical Context & Significance
Simon and Schuster published Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain in 1966, Kaplan's first book, and it won both the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 1967 National Book Award in Arts and Letters. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Thomas Lask wrote that not in years had a biography exposed the complexities of human character with such perceptiveness and such ability to keep each strand clear.
The book's unconventional structure, opening with its subject already an adult rather than starting at birth, was unusual for a literary biography at the time and became a technique Kaplan returned to in his later biographies of Walt Whitman and Lincoln Steffens. It established Kaplan's reputation and remains one of the most admired single volume accounts of Twain's life, praised particularly for treating the humorist and the private man as a single, genuinely divided subject rather than resolving one into the other.