Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Nov. 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), more famously known by his pen name, Mark Twain, was an American ...

In fact, argues Ron Chernow in a titanic new biography, Twain was “the largest literary personality that America has produced ...

Ron Chernow has written biographies about great men before but in Mark Twain he tackled a larger than life character known ...

Ron Chernow’s sweeping new biography explores how the “Huckleberry Finn” author became such a fixture in American literature ...

Mark Twain describes how his perceptions of the Mississippi River changed after he spent months piloting a steamboat up and ...

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Chernow specializes in big American lives. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of George Washington, and another of his ...

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts… Underlining Mark Twain ... and the Mississippi. For you cannot understand Twain ...

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion ...

In August 1934, in preparation for the construction of the on/off ramp for the planned municipal toll bridge (later named the ...

an experience that would inform Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and other books. The river gave him his pen name (the phrase "mark twain" indicated a safe water depth) and inflicted an ...