MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant - those are just some of the consequential American figures that Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Chernow has captured in his detailed and exhaustively researched biographies. Now he turns his eye to Mark Twain, arguably America's most famous writer. But also, as Chernow writes, the country's foremost talker and a hugely complicated, exasperating and, in some ways, tragic man. Ron Chernow is with us now to talk more about Mark Twain. Welcome back. Thank you so much for talking with us once again.
RON CHERNOW: So lovely to be here with you, Michel. Thank you.
MARTIN: Why him? Did you feel like something needed to be corrected or was missing?
CHERNOW: Well, this is kind of, I think, the great epic story in American letters. Mark Twain was the largest personality that American literature has produced, and it was really an ideal story because this story has an unusual amount of literary triumph and personal tragedy. It has all the light and shadow that one could possibly want in a biography.
MARTIN: So tell us about his early life. I mean, a lot of us know the basics. He was born Samuel Clemens. He was born in Missouri. You know, I was struck by how sad it was. Like, it just seemed like a really kind of sad and lonely upbringing.
CHERNOW: Yeah. His father fails at one business after another. He said of his relationship with his father that it amounted to a sort of armed neutrality and that it was little more than an introduction. But his older brother Orion was appointed secretary of the Nevada territory, and so he brought young Sam along. Sam at first tried his hand at mining. He didn't make a penny. But then he started contributing articles to a newspaper called The Territorial Enterprise, and they hired him as the city editor. And he said his first day on the job, he was terrified. He didn't have anything to write. And he said, then a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more.
MARTIN: Oh, my goodness (laughter).
CHERNOW: He had found his metier. And then in his early articles in this Nevada newspaper, he created a lot of hoaxes and tall tales. He became a very popular but also very controversial figure, then wound up in San Francisco, where a more serious literary career began.
MARTIN: You know, he was born into a slave-owning family.
CHERNOW: Yeah.
MARTIN: You write that no other white American in the 19th century engaged so fully with the Black community. I mean, you say, look, he reinvented himself as a Northeastern liberal - at times, even a radical - but you also point out that there are a number of very important issues relating to the treatment of Black Americans that he didn't write about at all.
CHERNOW: Yeah. OK. I mean, this is kind of a big part of the book. He is born into a slave-owning family in a slave-owning state. He said that when he was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, slavery was not only accepted, it was sanctioned by the church, who said slavery was considered, you know, God's pet project. And when he is a teenager, Michel, he has all of the kind of crude, racist attitudes that you would expect from someone, you know, who grew up in that environment.
He then marries into an abolitionist family, the Langdons, in Upstate New York and gets to know Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips and other abolitionists. And his views begin to change quite radically, to the point where, you know, in writing "Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn," it's arguably the greatest antislavery novel in the language. But his growth on this issue is so extraordinary. He said, for instance, that the birth of American liberty, even, is not 1776, but 1865, the year slavery was outlawed. He sarcastically said that the Declaration of Independence should have said that white men are created equal. And he even fully paid for the education of two Black students. He never becomes a perfect human being. But his growth from his, you know, racist beginnings really is a great story that I tried to reconstruct in very fine detail.
MARTIN: But you also point out how he was capable of these big thoughts - of really profound consideration - of this great stain on the American story. And yet he still felt - he was such a sucker when it came to his business dealings. And he's always picking fights with people. That's the other thing that you point out, is that he collected grudges as if they were money. Like, what's up with that?
CHERNOW: Well, it was interesting. You know, 'cause our image of Mark Twain, which has some truth to it, is of, you know, a man in a white suit smoking a cigar - a man who's dispensing witticisms, and he's very charming and genial and funny. And that was true. But beneath kind of the stereotypes, he could be very, very moody and temperamental. Mark Twain did not get past things. He would tend to brood on wrongs for months or years. He was lucky that he was married to a wonderful woman, Livy Langdon, who had to help him with what we would today call anger management. She trained him, for instance, when he sat down and wrote a very angry letter at someone, to stash the letter in the drawer and then write another one when he had cooled down a bit.
MARTIN: Is there something that you hope that people will get from this book that perhaps they haven't seen before or thought about when they think about him?
CHERNOW: Well, I think that, you know, Mark Twain - we tend to think of Mark Twain as the quintessential American. I was surprised to find in his notebook, he wrote a line, I am not an American. I am the American. Now, that sounds rather arrogant, but I think that it's probably true. And I kept feeling as I was writing this book that Mark Twain condensed in one life, in one person, both the best and the worst of our national character.
And I feel - also felt, Michel, that he was kind of very important for today. Mark Twain had very valuable things to say on patriotism. It drove him crazy when people would say, my country, right or wrong. He said we should support our country always, but our government only when it deserves it. He had wonderful things to say about the press. He said, irreverence is the champion of liberty and its surest guarantee. And he also warned us about the dangers of hyperpartisanship. He made the statement that if the Democrats put the multiplication table in their platform, the Republicans would vote it down in the next election. Doesn't that sound familiar? You know, so I think that he continues, across the span of a hundred years, to talk to us about all sorts of issues that remain relevant in American life today.
MARTIN: That's Ron Chernow. His new book is "Mark Twain." Ron Chernow, thank you so much for talking with us once again.
CHERNOW: Always a pleasure, Michel. Thank you.
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