Reviewed by:

• The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871–1891 by Gary Scharnhorst
• Nicolas S. Witschi

Whether he concerned himself with the nature of literary artifacts or of personal identities, the author who assumed the nom-de-plume “Mark Twain” consistently enjoyed drawing attention to the manner in which such things were in fact the products of deliberate craft and artifice. When dictating his own autobiography, Twain reportedly employed around 500,000 words and still could not, by many readers’ reckonings, satisfactorily sum up a literary life, an identity. Thus, he would no doubt have appreciated the irony of trying to describe and evaluate in a review of fewer than 700 words the merits of a volume that is over 800 pages in length, of trying to simplify something that by its very design is intended to avoid simplification. Indeed, the reduction of a variegated (reportedly one of Twain’s favorite words) and complex life into a simple narrative is something that Gary Scharnhorst’s expansive, thorough, and deeply engaging three-volume biography of Samuel Clemens works to avoid, and the result is remarkably successful.

The second installment of Scharnhorst’s The Life of Mark Twain covers some of the most momentous personal and literary events in Clemens’s life, ranging across a twenty-year stretch in which the [End Page 293] author known as Mark Twain comes fully into view. During this period Clemens enjoyed ever-increasing fame and fortune, and yet he also made many of the poor investments, particularly in the Paige Compositor typesetting machine, that eventually led to his declaring bankruptcy. In these years he also founded his own publishing company, which issued the highly successful Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, but this venture too would soon founder. In 1871 he moved his family from Buffalo, NY, to Hartford, CT; two decades later he left the latter city never to return. Nevertheless, the house on Hartford’s Farmington Avenue, along with his family’s summer residence in Elmira, NY, served in this period as home during the composition of many of Twain’s most significant publications, including such titles as the western-based Roughing It and also The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi. Specific to Twain’s contributions to western American literature, Scharnhorst also thoroughly covers such events during Twain’s “middle years” as his disastrous collaboration with Bret Harte on the play Ah Sin and the controversial Whittier birthday dinner speech, in which Clemens depicted his fellow attendees Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the guest of honor as hapless and inept tramps in the California gold country.

Opening to the first page of the present volume, one might be confused by the manner in which the narrative enters directly into the story, without any introductory comments or prefatory apparatus. In this respect, however, the book stands truly as a continuation of the tale Scharnhorst began in volume one, keeping going where the previous volume left off. For prefatory remarks, one does need to return to the first volume, in which the discussion of the unreliability of (auto)biographical sources of Clemens’s constant (re)invention of self and of the biographer’s inevitable collaboration in that act properly set the stage for the narrative that follows. Taken as a whole, this project may be read as an attempt to avoid a simplified constriction of a life. In this respect, Scharnhorst succeeds as well, turning up primary and contemporaneous material that further attests to the complexity of a man whose story plainly [End Page 294] cannot be reduced to the heretofore accepted but reductionist tale of an author beset by competing alter egos.

审核人：

• 马克吐温的生平：1871年至1891年的中世纪，加里·舍恩霍斯特（Gary Scharnhorst）
• 尼古拉斯·维奇（Nicolas S.Witschi）

不论他关注文学作品的本质还是个人身份，假设虚构的“马克·吐温”一词的作者一直都在提请他们注意这些东西实际上是刻意的手工艺品的产物。 。据报道，吐温在规定自己的自传时，使用了大约500,000个单词，但根据许多读者的估计，仍然不能令人满意地总结文学生涯和身份。因此，他无疑会怀有讽刺意味的讽刺意味，即尝试在少于700个单词的评论中描述和评估长度超过800页的一卷的优点，并试图简化其设计意图的内容。避免简化。的确，

沙恩霍斯特的第二部著作《马克·吐温的生平》涵盖了克莱门斯一生中一些最重要的个人和文学事件，涵盖了长达二十年的时光，其中[马克·吐温（Mark Twain）的第293页]作者得到了充分的关注。在此期间，克莱门斯享有越来越高的名声和财富，但他也进行了许多可怜的投资，​​尤其是在Paige Compositor排版机上，最终导致他宣布破产。这些年来，他还创立了自己的出版公司，发行了非常成功的《尤利西斯·S·格兰特个人回忆录》。，但这项事业也很快就会成立。1871年，他将家人从纽约州布法罗迁至康涅狄格州哈特福德。二十年后，他离开了后者，再也没有回来。尽管如此，哈特福德法明顿大街上的房子，以及他家人在纽约州埃尔米拉的夏季住所，在这段时期曾是吐温许多最重要出版物的创作地，其中包括诸如西方《Roughing It》和《The Roughing It》等书名。镀金时代，汤姆历险记，哈克贝利·费恩历险记，乞丐王子，康涅狄格洋基在亚瑟王的法院，一个流浪汉在国外，和密西西比河上的生活。具体到吐温对美国西部文学的贡献，沙恩霍斯特也彻底覆盖在吐温的“中年”这样的事件，与布雷特·哈特的发挥他的灾难性的合作，阿仙和争议的惠蒂尔生日晚宴演说中克莱门斯描述了他的同胞参加者拉尔夫·沃尔多艾默生，亨利·沃兹沃思·朗费罗（Henry Wadsworth Longfellow）和荣誉嘉宾在加利福尼亚金矿国家不幸而无能为力。

打开本卷的第一页，可能会对叙事直接进入故事的方式感到困惑，而没有任何介绍性的评论或准备。但是，从这方面来看，这本书确实是沙恩霍斯特小说从第一卷开始的延续，继续往前一卷停了下来。对于言辞，确实需要回到第一卷，在该卷中，关于克雷门斯不断（重新）发明自我的传记（自传）和传记作者不可避免的合作的不可靠性的讨论为这一行动奠定了基础。接下来的叙述。从总体上看，该项目可以看作是避免简化生活限制的尝试。在这方面，沙恩霍斯特（Scharnhorst）也取得了成功，[结束页294]不能被归结为迄今为止被接受的还原主义故事，即作家的故事被竞争的另类困扰。