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Reviewed by:
  • Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
  • Harold K. Bush Jr.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens. By Jerome Loving. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010. 548 pp. Cloth, $34.95.

Cultural interest in Mark Twain continues to grow unabated, and in the past several years a number of thick, deeply researched biographies have appeared. Chief among them so far are those written by Ron Powers (Mark Twain: A Life) and Fred Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain), along with dueling accounts of the final years published in 2010 by Laura Skandera-Trombley and Michael Shelden (Mark Twain’s Other Woman and Mark Twain: Man in White). Meanwhile, important primary materials continue to flow from university presses, not the least of which are the recent first volume of the Autobiography from California, as well as The Complete Interviews from Alabama, together weighing in at a hefty 1500 very crowded pages. There’s plenty to read about old Mark, which would have delighted him.

Jerome Loving, skilled biographer of Whitman, Dreiser, and others, now gives us a third long volume covering the entirety of Twain’s life and times. Given the sheer mass of Twain biographical output, the major attention in this review is on matters of approach and content, particularly Loving’s unique contributions and idiosyncratic observations. But before that, the obvious: Loving is deeply immersed in the primary and secondary literature about Twain, he aptly allows Twain or his contemporaries to tell much of the story, and he knows the historical era inside and out. Loving, in short, is a gifted writer and a very good storyteller, crucial ingredients in solid and entertaining biography. [End Page 184]

Now for more idiosyncratic features of Loving’s work. First, he is quite good at squeezing much fruitful discussion into short sections: there is a certain welcome economy to Loving’s craft. By Chapter 8, we are already into the Civil War, and although Loving asserts there correctly that Twain’s war experience is “one of the most remarkable areas of neglect” in Twain studies, he covers much ground in his succinct yet highly suggestive chapter of only seven pages. The brevity and breeziness here is characteristic of what is most admirable about Loving’s style. Similarly, in the chapters on “Publishing Grant,” or in “Exile’s Return” about his anti-Imperialist sensibilities, or the “Death in Florence” section on Livy’s demise, much is done in few pages. Loving resurrects Twain’s quirky brother Orion in just six pages of text. Serious Twain scholars might complain that too little is covered in these brief chapters, and in that sense perhaps it is fair to say that this is a book aiming at a different clientele. If you are looking for a solid, readable biography incorporating the best recent scholarship and utilizing primary materials in an efficient manner, this is probably the place to begin. And if you want to know more about Grant or the Philippines, then consult the sources in the notes.

In general, Loving covers the key topics and there’s little to quibble with. Some might point out the relative lack of discussion of Twain’s engagement with religion—a dominant theme in Twain studies in recent years. Others might question the slight coverage of Twain’s final years, a massive new area of interest for specialists, but one slighted a bit here (in truth, this patch of Twain’s life might now be over-covered). A few remarks about Twain’s views of homosexuality are speculative and at best controversial. (Loving appears to accept uncritically such commentaries as those popularized by Andrew Hoffman in the 1990s.) Also, and unfortunately for readers of ALR, Loving has very little to say about realism and the competing theories of literature during Twain’s lifetime (“realism” is not even in the index).

One notable highlight is Loving’s attempt to bring some of his narrative into the contemporary setting, as in the eccentric Twain impersonators he invokes, or the comments about Twain social criticism as being standard late-in-life preoccupations of Nobel Prize winning authors (which Twain would certainly have won, Loving argues). If the other...

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