Western American Literature

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.