Classic book review: Mark Twain: A Life

Twain channeled the adventures of his rough-and-tumble life into new institutions springing up in America. He began writing for newspapers just at a time when they traveled far and wide enough to win a gifted local writer a national audience. He was - literally - pushed onto the lecture stage when Americans flocked to such entertainment. And he moved into book publishing just as a growing US middle class made the industry viable.

Twain's remarkable wit certainly established his enormous early celebrity (Powers calls him the first rock star), but his enduring appeal is far more complex.

His is an original voice - and as Powers points out - a uniquely American voice. He brought the freshness and authenticity of Western language to readers on the East Coast and in Europe, and he shattered the sweet sentimentality of the literature of his time, replacing it with realism, with what James Agee would later call, "The Cruel Radiance of What Is."

In 1885 he gave the world "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the novel from which, Ernest Hemingway once said, "all modern American literature comes." It was also the book - for all the racial controversy that it still creates - that brought African-American voices straight into the heart of US literature.

Powers does a thorough job of tracking Twain's development both as a writer and a human being, and the book offers some particularly lovely pleasures, including the treatment of Twain's great love for his wife (one of the funniest men in America, he chose to marry a sweet, earnest intellectual slow to grasp his jokes, whom he called his "dear little concentration of Literalness"); his long friendship with fellow literary giant William Dean Howells; and the description of the black child who served Twain dinner one night and helped to unlock the voice of Huckleberry Finn.

For the general reader, there are places where Powers's detail may grow tiresome and slow the energy of the narrative. But there are few quarrels to be made with the quality of his research (although the book does contain a completely inaccurate definition of Christian Science, offered in passing as Powers details some of Twain's tirades against Mary Baker Eddy, founder of this newspaper.)

The book's ending is bleak. Twain's vision was always dark, but his latter years were truly tragic, including the loss of his wife and two of his adult children.

Writing about a man vastly uncomfortable with sentiment, Powers manages to deliver Twain as an emotional being.

It's no small achievement. As Howells once remarked of his sharp-eyed but guarded friend, "You were all there for him, but he was not all there for you."

Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's Book editor.

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