The Book Review16 Maj 2025

Ron Chernow on His New Mark Twain Biography

The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in “Mark Twain,” Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century’s biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject.

“The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,” Chernow says. But at the same time, “I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America’s small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.”

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