A New Biography Of The Most Famous American Of His Time: Mark Twain

Michael Dirda reviews Roy Morris Jr.'s book, American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad.

There are probably more studies and biographies of Mark Twain — the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) — than of any other figure in American literature. And why not?

After all, Twain produced at least three or four titles that rank high on almost everyone’s list of favorite books. “Huckleberry Finn” is a leading contender in the The Great American Novel sweepstakes. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as biographer Roy Morris Jr. observes, “seems to take place in perpetual summer” and conveys an “ineffable magic.” Twain’s own favorites, if no one else’s, were “The Prince and the Pauper” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Instead of those “English” novels, I would argue for “Life on the Mississippi.”

However, Mark Twain was more than just an author. The barefoot boy from hardscrabble Hannibal, Mo., rose to become a global celebrity, the most famous American of his time, rivaled only by Teddy Roosevelt (whom he once derided as the “Tom Sawyer of the political world”). His quips and yarn-filled performances in “Mark Twain at Home” took him to lyceums, opera halls and auditoriums around the world. In fact, as “American Vandal” reminds us, he spent more than a dozen years of his adult life outside the United States.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-new-biography-of-the-most-famous-american-of-his-time-mark-twain/2015/03/18/f5b9a48e-cbf7-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html

Mark Twain, American Diplomat

Roy Morris, Jr. offers an interesting piece at politico.com on one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain.

As his fame as an author and humorist grew, Mark Twain increasingly gained access to the most glittering palaces and persons in the world. It was a long step up from the muddy streets and ramshackle riverfront docks of his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, but Twain viewed his ascent as little more than his natural due. He was, as he was fond of saying, “not an American, but the American,” and during his many trips abroad he functioned as a one-man diplomatic corps, employing his characteristic blend of self-deprecation and understated wit on foreign people everywhere. “Mark Twain, known by everyone, liked by all” was more than an advertising slogan on a wooden cigar box. It was a simple statement of fact, as everyone from the king of England to the lowliest railroad porter in Calcutta could attest.

 

Twain first entered the rarefied world of international diplomacy in the summer of 1867, while accompanying his fellow American “vandals” on the transatlantic cruise to Europe and the Holy Land that made him famous as a (comparative) innocent abroad. At that point in his career, Twain was best known nationally for his riotous tall tale, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which was published in the Saturday Press in 1865 and caught on with the reading public across the country. Following a six-month stay in the Sandwich Islands, as Hawaii then was known, he made his debut as a stage performer in California in the autumn of 1866, delivering a droll, deadpan lecture, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” to convulsing audiences across the West. “In October 1866, I broke out as a lecturer,” he would say later, “and from that day to this I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/mark-twain-american-diplomat-114775.html#.VN2Klct0yM8

Roy Morris, Jr. is the author of American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad.