Mr Clemens and Mark Twain -- A Biography Mass Market Paperback – January 1, 1968 Author: Visit Amazon's Justin Kaplan Page | Language: English | ISBN:
B000MMWTGE | Format: PDF, EPUB
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- Mass Market Paperback: 512 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books; 1st edition (1968)
- ASIN: B000MMWTGE
- Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
Kaplan's National Book Award and Pulitzer winner starts with Samuel Clemens' arrival in the East already quite famous due to the popularity of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Almost immediately Clemens sets off to earn his living as a humorous lecturer. Kaplan shows us the many techniques he used such as the extended pause and how carefully he orchestrated his performances.
Clemens' first literary success was INNOCENTS ABROAD about his trip accompanying a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land. It was always one of his most successful books. It was also published by subscription, which means that it was sold pretty much door-to-door.
For me, one of the most entertaining parts of the book was Clemens' courtship of coal heiress Livy Langdon, whose brother, Charlie, had been one of the pilgrims on the INNOCENTS ABROAD trip. She rejected him, telling him she could never love him. He convinced her theirs could be a brother/sister relationship. Then he fell out of his carriage and she had to nurse him back to health.
Much of the book details Clemens' obsession with James W. Paige's typesetting machine, which eventually bankrupted him. According to Kaplan, Clemens always led a duel existence (hence the title), with Mark Twain, the famous writer and social critic, and Samuel Clemens, the incompetent entrepreneur, always at loggerheads.
Kaplan is almost offhandish when it comes to the early deaths of Clemens' daughters Susy and Jean. Clemens never recovered from Susy's death and Jean's preceded his own by just a few months.
Mark Twain was an easy author to admire but a hard man to love. Justin Kaplan gets at both sides of this singular figure of American letters in this fast-moving if often hyper-analytical and maudlin biography.
To get the negative out of the way early, there's a lot more psychobabble here than I expected. Kaplan's book won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award after its 1966 publication, and maybe I approached it too much with that acclaim in mind. His wife Livy is described when we first meet her as Twain's "superego", and much of the rest of the man's life story is similarly fed through a Freudian prism. There's also a good deal more information about Twain's various failed business ventures and invention gambits than you'd expect, or I think, really need.
Another choice Kaplan made was one I came around to in time, which was to start the book in the middle of Twain's life. When we meet him, Samuel Clemens is coming off his first success, the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County," and seeking his fortune on the East Coast, where writing talents had their best shot at fame and fortune. Ironically, Clemens found his by leaving the Coast, on a boat with a group of religious pilgrims which would form the basis of his breakthrough first book, "The Innocents Abroad." In the process, he formed the alter ego by which Clemens became famous, Mark Twain.
"He was, at the very least, already a double creature," Kaplan writes. "He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside."
On the boat, for example, he coddled blue-nosed ladies and made shows of piety while jotting down notes for the book that would send them up for national ridicule.
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