Comprehensive, enthralling . . .Mark Twainflows like the Mississippi River, its prose propelled by Mark Twains own exuberance. The Boston Globe

Chernow writes with such ease and clarity . . . For all its length and detail, [Mark Twain] is deeply absorbing throughout. The Washington Post

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become Americas first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writin