The Many Lives of Mark Twain

The Adventures of Samuel Clemens

Mark Twain lived half a dozen lives—between poverty and prosperity, fame and obscurity. By the end of this life, though, he was a thing rare even today: a world-famous celebrity who hobnobbed with world leaders (the tsar of Russia, President Woodrow Wilson) and titans of industry (Andrew Carnegie) and yet had become only more political and more principled. Reviewing Ron Chernow’s new biography of Twain for the latest issue of Books & the Arts, Adam Hochschild writes that part of Chernow’s “achievement is to show us how…complicated…his life was,” how uncertain its trajectory, how many different directions it took at once. Hochschild observes that Twain ended up a lot like one of his own characters: a figure who transcended being one type alone. Having achieved considerable fame, Twain “put his celebrity status to use by speaking out for his beliefs,” Hochschild argues. “His reckoning with slavery led to a passionate rage at other injustices. He wrote, spoke, and lobbied, for example, against the ruthless forced labor system that King Leopold II of Belgium imposed on the Congo. And against the grain of American public opinion, he vigorously protested the brutal colonial war that the United States waged in the Philippines. ‘I am opposed,’ he said, ‘to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.’” Read “Mark Twain’s Many Lives”

A Silver Crown

In A Yellow Wood, a career-spanning collection of shorter works selected by Cynthia Ozick, conjures a world that is cold and forbidding—fixated on the past and critical of the present. While the collection is largely unpolitical, Hannah Gold writes in her review, it is still “shaped by Ozick’s conservative instincts in other ways—her insistence on the unique privileges of genius, her laments about the state of contemporary culture, and her suspicion that the younger generations of novelists can’t match the brilliance of figures like T.S. Eliot and Saul Bellow.” The pursuit of genius and fame defines many of the stories, and a specific sense of hierarchy emerges in her nonfiction essays: “The social order that matters to her is one of literary gods and idols,” Gold writes. “In this sacred order, anyone can have been blessed with creative genius, but as the fruits of our labors are harvested, reviewed, and juried by prize committees, a rigid hierarchy solidifies that Ozick reveres and hopes to climb.” Read “The Cold and Forbidding Worlds of Cynthia Ozick”