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Mark Twain: A Life

ron powers

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Ron Powers’s tour de force has been widely acclaimed as the best life and times, filled with Mark Twain’s voice, and as a great American story.

Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.

736 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2005
Literary awards
national book critics circle award, 

This edition

Format
736 pages, Paperback
Published
June 5, 2006 by Free Press
ISBN
9780743249010
ASIN
0743249011
Language
English

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About the author

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ron powers

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Ron Powers (born 1941) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer. His face include White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal, Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, and Mark Twain: A Life. With James Bradley, he co-wrote the 2000 #1 New York Times Bestseller Flags of Our Fathers.

Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1973 for his critical writing as TV-radio-columnist for Chicago Sun-Times about television during 1972. He was the first television critic to win the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1985, Powers won an Emmy Award for his work on CBS News Sunday Morning.

Powers was born in 1941 in Hannibal, Missouri — Mark Twain's hometown. Hannibal was influential in much of Powers' writing — as the subject of his book White Town Drowsing, as the location of the two true-life murders that are the subject of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore, and as the home of Mark Twain. Powers has said that his fascination with Twain — the subject of two of his books — began in childhood:

"When I was a little boy in Hannibal, he was a mystic figure to me. His pictures and books and images were all over (my friend) Dulany Winkler's house, and I spent a lot of time there. I just wanted to reach out and touch him. Eventually I was able to."

In addition to writing, Powers has taught for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, and at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

Powers is married and has two sons. He currently resides in Castleton, Vermont.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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Profile Image for Kimberly .
Steligy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Of the works by Mark Twain I've only read the two most famous, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and I have to admit that I knew next-to-nothing about this famous author other than that he grew up on the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. I read this book on a whim and as the chapters progressed I found myself increasingly interested and by the end of the book, fascinated by this iconic literary figure.

Ron Powers makes Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain come to life starting with his boyhood in frontier Missouri, taking the reader step by step through many adventures of the author's life and citing passages from recently discovered Clemens notebooks and letters as well as excerpts from magazine columns and published works.

I feel like I can more fully appreciate Mark Twain's innovative style and writing techniques as well as why he occupies such an exalted status in American literature. I am really excited about the prospect of going back to the source and reading more of Mark Twain's writings.
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crystalweaver
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Powers's profile is much more nuanced than the common image of Twain as a genial wit. He certainly was flawed; Powers doesn't leave anything out. Twain was alternately supportive and hugely cruel to his hapless brother, Orion, whose particular talent was finding ways to lose money. I wonder if this ever caused Twain a twinge later, when he himself had to be rescued from financial peril by the industrialist Henry Rogers.

It seems to me that Twain's books were driven more by commercial necessity than by artistic inspiration. He was a total 'quant' when it came to literature: assessed his progress by the number of words written, and seemed never to start a book without predicting the number he'd sell.

Still, he was a brilliant aphorist and on the 'right' side of many issues. His attitudes towards racism were complex, but he saw and spoke out against anti-semitism in Austria at the turn of the century, and condemned US imperialism in the Phillipines.

He convinced General Grant to write his memoirs; his publishing firm (during one of its rare periods of financial stability) actually brought out the book.

Powers is a readable, playful writer. In an early newspaper story Twain is described as 'absquatulating' after insulting the Lady's Sanitary Commission in Nevada. Powers manages to find at least 5 more sentences where 'absquatulate' is the necessary word.

This is a whole lotta Twain (627 pages not counting the footnotes), but worth it.
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K-Lye
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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What a slog. I have never taken so long to get through a book. The writing style was dense. Now I know every detail about Mark Twain and 70 years of American history I guess.
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Aradeid
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Mark Twain was a complex man: courageous and bold, gregarious, not knowing when to keep his mouth shut, loving and devoted to his wife and children, unpredictable, a world traveler always at the best hotel in town.

Ron Powers has painted a portrait of Twain's life that demonstrates all of his brilliance and convolutions. Most of its contents were unknown to me (and probably you too).
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Arius900
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I have only had the barest knowledge of Samuel Clemens' aka Mark Twain's upbringing. This particular work is a forensic examination of his life. It is not a quick or a light read. It is the serious telling of Twain's life.
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Maleri_kun
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A great book about Mark Twain, his strengths and his weaknesses. His life defines an era when writers were important, prominent people who guided their nation. His writing of the novel, Huckleberry Finn, depicted the burning issues of his day: the struggle against slavery and the power of the church. He was one of the first authors to do "tours" traveling across the nation on the newly built railroad system. He was the first to do "stand up" comedy. His early life on the steamboats made him a gambling man and he invested in what could have been the first typewriter if it hadn't been so large and inefficient. He married into money and lived in several beautiful homes, the most spectacular one is now a museum in Hartford, Connecticut. This book by Ron Powers is thorough and well-written. If you are intrigued by this era and this writer, you will enjoy this book.
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obSASSion
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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An adventurous life filled with tragic losses and much success.
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Laurielaurs
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book is more interesting if the index is used to find topics of interest. I find that I pick up the book every now and then and will do this. Whatever I read is interesting. But when I read the book from the beginning, it seemed tedious. Twain is an interesting life, no doubt.
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