A lively, richly detailed, and sharply perceptive biography.
The transformation of newspaperman Samuel Clemens into popular essayist and entertainer Mark Twain.
Although Twain (1835-1910) has been the subject of scores of biographies and studies, his life story has never been told, asserts Scharnhorst (Emeritus, English/Univ. of New Mexico; Owen Wister and the West, 2015, etc.), “from beginning to end from a single point of view on an expansive canvas.” The author brings considerable authority and astute analysis to the first volume of his planned multivolume biography, drawing on Twain’s writings, letters (more than 5,000 made available since Justin Kaplan’s acclaimed biography of Twain was published in 1966), memoirs by Twain’s contemporaries, and nearly everything—reviews, remarks, and scholarship—written about Twain. Although Scharnhorst admits that he has discovered no “bombshells” or “dark secrets,” he offers a cleareyed, balanced portrait of the restless, irreverent, hard-drinking writer and lecturer who, no matter how much money he earned, seemed perpetually in debt. Twain worked for several newspapers after he gave up piloting on the Mississippi, with varying success. He was not well-liked by his colleagues on Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, for example, recalled for being “a notoriously lazy grinder” who, when he should have been cranking out copy, instead sat “drumming on a cracked guitar.” As a young man, he held decidedly racist views, which he “outgrew” after he moved to cosmopolitan San Francisco in 1865. As far as sex, “little is known,” Scharnhorst asserts, although judging from some ribald writings, Twain “seems to have been thoroughly familiar with western bordellos” and may have been treated for venereal disease. Twain was an enthusiastic world traveler whose jaunts were funded by newspapers to which he contributed “letters” from abroad. He supplemented his income by performing as a “literary comedian” in the manner of renowned Artemus Ward, to whom he was often favorably compared. Scharnhorst ends his first volume with the publication of Twain’s well-received The Innocents Abroad (1869), his marriage to the heiress Livy Langdon, and the birth of their son.
A lively, richly detailed, and sharply perceptive biography.Pub Date: March 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8262-2144-5
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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