Talks & Entertainment

In Mark Twain, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the fascinating life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature. Before he was Mark Twain, he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 and spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi.

After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. His madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior.

Drawing on Twain’s archives, Chernow captures the person whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Mark Twain is a moving tribute to the talent and humanity of America’s first and most influential literary celebrity. 

Chernow is the prizewinning author of seven books including Grant and Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the Broadway musical. He is one of only three living biographers to have won the Gold Medal for Biography of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.