Mark TwainA Life

An unusually complete, authoritative work that lends perspective to Twains' triumphs — and his flaws Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, is one of those titanic figures that biographers flock toward. He is also one of those whose character and life were so inherently dramatic and complex that they make the writing of a holistic biography nearly impossible. Those tempted to focus Clemens' life and work in the lens of a single defining moment have many to choose from: his traumatic birth, a lost love that haunted him into old age, or his brother's horrific death in a steamboat explosion, to name just a few. In Mark Twain: A Life, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Powers avoids the myopic narrative views that have constrained many of Clemens' biographers, presenting the full sweep of Clemens' life in an effort to make sense of the man so lionized that we often overlook why people are so drawn to his body of work, which Powers sums up as "nearly all of it problematic, much of it mediocre, a healthy part of it unfinished, some of it simply awful."

Clemens got his literary start as a journalist in a time where inventiveness often trumped truthfulness on newspapers' priority lists. As a "reporter," Clemens fabricated massacres, scooped the imaginary discovery of a petrified man, and covered legislative sessions with such flagrant disregard for politics that legislators thanked him. While Clemens had no trouble forgoing basic facts in favor of higher truths, Powers doesn't have the same flexibility. Clemens' life story lends itself to legend, but Powers succeeds in avoiding caricature, positioning him as a figure in his own mythology.