Mark Twain, Ron Chernow, 1,200 pages, Penguin Press, May 13, 2025. $45.
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow has compiled an exhaustive volume on Samuel Clemens, who as Mark Twain became one of America’s most beloved humorists and witty observers of the human experience. More of a rigorously researched encyclopedia at 1,200 pages and 3½ pounds, Chernow’s book best serves as an almanac or catalog of Twain’s carefully documented minutia about his life rather than a broad, accessible portrait of the author. Sales prospects should be excellent on this perennially best-selling subject, but recreational reading it is not.
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Were I a more gifted writer, I would compose a review of Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain in the style of its subject, a man of sharp humor who lampooned prolix writing and loved nothing more than deflating overblown pretensions with a deftly placed barb. In Mark Twain, one of America’s most famous humorists is ill served with a long-winded biography that has a surfeit of details, little humor and less wit.
Above all other things, Twain was a storyteller, and this biography’s main weakness is that it lacks a story. There are people. There are events. There are details. But there is no storytelling. Continue reading
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