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Mark Twain conquered almost every challenge that came his way except old age. Living well into his seventies, he was a printer, an investigative journalist, a riverboat captain, a government functionary, a bestselling novelist, an imperialism-defying political essayist, a successful playwright and a devoted father and husband. He travelled the world giving lectures that made
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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