Chernow on Mark Twain

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

I enjoyed listening to Ron Chernow discuss his new biography of Mark Twain on the Ryen Russillo podcast. I haven't read the book, but I've been eyeing it over the past couple of months. I'd read a pretty scathing review of Mark Twain in The New York Times, which had put me off a bit, but I understand as well as anybody that a scathing review usually tells us more about the reviewer than the book. 

It was interesting to learn about Twain's entrepreneurial side. It reminded me a bit of Rebecca Loncrain's biography of L. Frank Baum in some ways. 

Back when I was researching and writing my book on Nâzım Hikmet, I read dozens of biographies and memoirs, mostly about people who had nothing to do with Turkey, communism, or the USSR: Charles Schultz, Elvis Presley, Pierre Trudeau, Ernest Hemingway, Delmore Schwartz, Jim Henson, and Napoleon III, to name just a few. Heck, I even read Gene Simmons' memoirs, Kiss and Make Up. Basically, I just read about folks that I was interested in, whether or not their stories immediately seemed relevant to my book on Nâzım. 

What mattered to me in reading these books was studying what worked--and what didn't--in commercially-published biographies and memoirs. What story was being told? What did I like about the writing and the overall story arc? What, if anything, did I find distracting in the work? How would I do things differently? These were the sorts of questions I asked myself as I read. 

I still feel like I'm in the process of learning how to write clear, enjoyable-to-read prose, writing that doesn't get in the way of the story. Being able to do this does not, I think, have to make a book less scholarly. A book can be both a good read and say something bigger about an era, or about a transition from one era to another. Continuity and change, that sort of thing. 

Reading big, non-academic works like Chernow's latest (if I every get around to it) is good practice for a scholarly biographer. When it comes to clarity, pace, and overall structure, there is a lot that scholarly biographers can learn from books like these. But even these technical-sounding changes do, I think, end up influencing the book in deeper, less immediately perceptible ways. 

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For more on Nâzım Hikmet and my book, look here.