Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I just finished reading Mark Twain: A Life, by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer, Ron Powers (Free Press, 2006). This is an in-depth biography of the famous writer and humorist Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. At times, it seems too detailed, as it covers more than I wanted to know. Nevertheless, Powers does an excellent job of helping the reader understand the complexities of the man, and he also helps the reader understand American culture during the 19th century, as the two as so closely intertwined. This is a biography, not a literary critique, so Powers does not put heavy emphasis on analyzing Twain’s writing, although he does give a balanced discussion of how literary critics have judged his works, with special attention to his greatest work, Huckleberry Finn.Some new things that I learned about Twain:*he traveled extensively as a young adult and for the rest of his life*he had a lost love that he never forgot*he had a fierce temper*he believed in God, but was turned off by the hypocrisy he saw in church, causing him to struggle in his faith*he was a sucker for bad investments, but famously paid off his debts*he had friendships with famous Americans, such as Henry Ward Beecher, William Dean Howells, Helen Keller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ulysses S. Grant*he almost fought a battle against Ulysses S. Grant, but later became a close friend of Grant, and published Grant’s autobiography*during his latter years, he turned to political satire*the context of some of his famous one-linersSpeaking of one-liners, I must mention a few of my favorites from the book:“Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.”“I worked in a bookstore, but didn’t like it because the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort.”“He would rather decline two drinks than one German verb.”“The new hobbies in the election year 1876 are politics and pornography. But I repeat myself.”“Do you know why Balaam’s ass spoke Hebrew? Because he was a he-brayist.”“When I was a boy everybody was poor but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.”“You can’t pray a lie– I found that out.” (quote of Huckleberry Finn)“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”If you love Mark Twain and American history, and you don’t mind reading a long book, you will enjoy this biography. If you don’t want to wade through 736 pages to learn about Twain’s life, or if you are more interested in a literary analysis of his writings than the story of his life, you may want to read a different biography.

⭐Mark Twain had an incredible memory for dialogue and dialects. He would say an unfamiliar dialect until he got it right and then write it down phonetically. He would then have the appropriate characters use that dialect as the author’s voice for making points that brought to light the reality of situations to which most people were blind. As Powers indicates, this changed American literature forever. It gave the potential author points of view by which to look at human life that the “normal” perspective could not understand and opened up worlds that were unknown or not considered important before Twain. Combined with a brilliant ability to write dialogue, Twain showed truths about human life that changed everything in American literature.But this ability of a true genius was embedded in a deeply flawed and ambiguous person, a person who only partially overcame some deep prejudices, often showed uncaring irrational cruelty to friends and family, and frequently acted in self-centered and narcissistic ways. Powers does an excellent job of showing both the genius and the flaws. Powers’ own writing is clear with smooth transitions and well-organized chapters and paragraphs. Though a long book, it is easy to follow with chapter titles followed by the months or years covered in the chapter. Multiple double-spaced breaks in each chapter allow the reader to stop at a break point and come back with no problem. Powers adds periodically a touch of humor in the story analogous to what Twain would have done. It is usually a sentence or a phrase, sometimes just a word. For example, he has Twain “absquatulate” to the West before his ragtag group of Confederate volunteers at the beginning of the war could be attacked by, of all people, a fairly ragtag team of Union soldiers led by a new leader, Ulysses S. Grant. “Absquatulate” is exactly the kind of 25 cent word, a bit strange sounding, that Twain would insert into his work at times. I found such bits of irony or mimicry of Twain appropriate and a helpful addition to the flow of the narrative.Powers lays out the best and worst of this American original. This is a terrific biography that keeps the reader’s attention from Sam Clemons’ birth to Mark Twain’s death.

⭐Recently toured up and down through Missouri and Iowa and spent a lot of time doing the Mark Twain touristy stuff. Reading this book afterwards sheds more light on this remarkable mans life. Great read.

⭐Fantastic biography, full of juicy details and wonderfully written.

⭐I was amazing at the amount of Twain’s work: letters, novels and public appearances were condensed down into a chronological timeline, chapter by chapter. I hope to have such an interesting life!

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