To call Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume biography of Mark Twain monumental is an understatement. With the publication of the third volume, The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891-1910, Scharnhorst, distinguished professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, has completed the most comprehensive biography of the American author ever written. Twain has been the subject of nearly 100 biographies, but not since his official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, published his three-volume biography in 1912 has the author been treated at such length. Paine’s massive biography is marred by the constraints put on him by Twain’s only surviving daughter, Clara Clemens, who worked to protect her father’s image, barring Paine from presenting controversial and negative aspects of Twain’s life and his work. Later biographers have had no such constraints, aside from the constraint of recounting his life in a single volume. Scharnhorst, then, has gone into more detail with more fullness than any of his many predecessors.
In 18 chapters and an epilogue, volume three covers Twain’s life in his last two decades — the most controversial, the most heralded, and the saddest period of his life. Rather than merely rehash what previous biographers have written, Scharnhorst conducted voluminous research of primary sources to tell his story of Twain’s last years with freshness and precision, correcting numerous long-held, persistent myths. Unlike many other Twain biographers, he does not write with an overriding thesis but with a determined scholar’s search for the facts. He outlined his procedure and philosophy in the preface to his first volume, The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871 (Missouri, 2018): “The first task of Sam Clemens’s biographers, in short, should be to sort facts from factoids or truth from truthiness, a process akin to stripping lacquer from a painting to reveal the original pigments or removing carpet to expose the grains in a hardwood floor.” The internet has made available many new letters as well as newspaper and magazine sources unknown to previous biographers, and Scharnhorst has made full use of them to complete his story.
The last two decades of Twain’s life (Scharnhorst calls him “Sam”) were his most turbulent. Because of financial and medical problems, in 1891 the Clemens family was forced into exile in Europe, leaving behind, for good as it turned out, their beloved mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. They traveled all over Europe but settled in Florence, Italy, which they loved. Back in America, the financial woes mounted: Declining profits from Twain’s publishing firm, Webster and Company, coupled with Twain’s ill-fated investment in the complicated Paige typesetting machine, were exacerbated by the Panic of 1893, America’s worst economic downturn until the Great Depression of the 1930s. The bankruptcy of the publishing firm in 1894 meant personal bankruptcy for Twain, compounded by the ultimate failure of the typesetter in which he had invested a fortune. For money, Twain published such novels as Pudd’nhead Wilson and Tom Sawyer Abroad, then embarked on an around-the-world lecture tour to begin to pay off his debts. A resulting travel book, Following the Equator, recounting his time in Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa as well as sound financial advice and insider trading from Standard Oil executive and robber baron Henry H. Rogers, allowed Twain to pay off his creditors in full, an accomplishment that brought him worldwide acclaim.
But these years were also marked by profound family tragedy. As Twain, his wife, Livy, and their middle daughter, Clara, were finishing the world tour, their eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis in the Hartford house, a traumatic event that plunged Twain and the family into grief and despair, perhaps the hardest blow that was to hit Twain in his life. Compounding that loss, their youngest daughter, Jean, began suffering from the epileptic seizures that were to plague her for the rest of her short life. Twain moved his family all over Europe searching for cures for Jean’s epilepsy, Livy’s worsening heart problems, and his own debilitating rheumatism, which made it very difficult for him to write. Death came to Livy in Florence in 1904, then to Jean on Christmas Eve in 1909. Only Clara survived her father, who had also lost his only son, Langdon, in infancy. These losses were one reason Twain railed against what he called “the damned human race.”
Despite such gloom and despair, these last decades were also marked by many triumphs. Twain was constantly in demand as a speaker at innumerable banquets and charity events at which he displayed his wit as well as his wisdom. The list of notable people he met and dazzled is long: Oscar Wilde, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Prince of Wales, William James, Winston Churchill, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, Booker T. Washington, Thomas Edison, and Nicola Tesla, among many others. Especially touching is his friendship with Helen Keller, a mutual admiration that deeply affected both of them.
Upon Twain’s return to America in 1900 after a decade abroad, he was met with much acclaim, but he surprised the press and the public when he announced himself to be an anti-imperialist. He was outraged by European imperialism in Africa and Asia but especially by America’s involvement in Cuba and the Philippines. Twain became an outspoken and controversial figure: President Theodore Roosevelt called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Twain called Roosevelt “the Tom Sawyer of the political world, always showing off” — although he did not publish the remark. Newspapers went to him for comment on every important event of the day, and his opinions were widely reported, hailed by many, and criticized by perhaps many more.
In fact, one of the impressions the reader receives from Scharnhorst’s detailing of the public reactions to Twain’s works, his lectures, his opinions, and his actions is to see how divided people were about him in his time. Twain has come to be a revered figure in American life and letters. But during his life, especially in his last years, he was as reviled as he was celebrated. Rather than take sides, Scharnhorst merely reports the reactions, positive and negative, letting the reader decide. As Scharnhorst writes, in his last decade, Twain was a “cultural critic, public intellectual, and political sage.”
Washington, D.C., looms large in this volume. Besides his political pronouncements, he was a force in the city, especially as he lobbied Congress for the passage of improved copyright laws, a cause he spearheaded for many years. It was in an address to Congress in 1906 that he first appeared out of season in a white suit, a flamboyant fashion faux pas that gained as much notoriety as his lobbying and has itself become an iconic image.
On a personal and professional level, his last five years saw him write less and less for publication, venting his anger and expressing his bleak philosophy in works that he did not intend to publish in his lifetime and indeed that he often did not even finish, including most of his dictated biography, his vitriolic and irreligious Letters from the Earth, and the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Only after Clara’s death in 1962 did much of these late dark writings emerge, altering the perception of Twain from a genial humorist in a white suit to a raging misanthrope — although as Scharnhorst shows, that is an overstatement.
When Twain died April 21, 1910, at age 74 of heart problems caused by years of constant smoking, he was mourned and eulogized the world over. In his time, as has been said, he was “the most conspicuous person on the planet.” And ever the showman himself, he certainly reveled in that.
The Twain that emerges in these three volumes, a total of more than 2,400 pages, is a study in contrasts: a person who was talented, driven, creative, and devoted to his family but also iconoclastic, irascible, and at times quite petty. Scharnhorst presents the man, both his virtues and his warts, with scrupulous honesty and impeccable scholarship.
The general reader will likely be daunted by the sheer volume of facts Scharnhorst presents. No doubt many readers will glaze over at the long lists of banquet attendees, newspaper reviews of lectures and works, places visited, and people met. This precise documentation, vital to scholars in a scholarly biography, could be off-putting. But for readers who want the whole story, Scharnhorst’s work is indispensable, rewarding patience with revelations, surprises, humor, and myth-busting on nearly every page. Scharnhorst has written the definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers — a monumental work on a monumental figure that will stand the test of time and is highly recommended for anyone who wants the fullest and most accurate account of Twain’s life.
John Bird is emeritus professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor and the editor of Mark Twain in Context, as well as the author of a number of articles on Twain. He is a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and the founding editor of The Mark Twain Annual.
