Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
The Lives and Loves of Samuel Clemens
By Larry McMurtry
The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography
by Fred Kaplan
Doubleday, 726 pp., $35.00
Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years
by Karen Lystra
University of California Press, 342 pp., $27.50
'My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water,' Mark Twain observed, in a note. Was he bragging or complaining? Did he realize that two of his books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, were among the richest word-wines ever vinted in America? Long before the nineteenth century ended Mark Twain was a world figure—in the field of letters our only world figure. His white suit and white hair were recognized everywhere. He traveled widely and even had an honorary degree from Oxford, not to mention Yale and the University of Missouri. His cranky, abstemious admirer George Bernard Shaw went so far as to say that it was Mark Twain who taught him that 'telling the truth was the funniest joke in the world.' But did Twain's enormous success have much to do with truth-telling, or did he, like Shaw, treat truth like a bicycle that could be abruptly kicked aside when the author couldn't make it go as fast or far as he wanted it to go?
Review, 2620 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |