Fresh and funny today as he was more than a century ago, Mark Twain wittily distrusted everything bogus, inflated, predictable or empty. He was a man of a thousand American parts — novelist, stand-up comic, travel writer, impresario, capitalist, full-time celebrity and coruscating social critic — whose ear for dialogue, nuance, slang and absurdity seldom failed him. No wonder we still read him, debate him, scold him, censor him. William Dean Howells aptly canonized him as the “Lincoln of our literature.”
Although his life and works have been ceaselessly raked over by such fine critics as Ralph Ellison, Justin Kaplan, and more recently by Ron Powers, Twain remains a mysterious stranger. How did the uneducated boy from Hannibal, Mo., become the energetic superstar who seemed to encapsulate the very essence of America, even as he skewered it? He was a liberal, a racist, an anti-imperialist, a kind man, an angry man, a nonracist and a riot.
Two new books squarely place Twain, né Samuel Clemens, in the booming, tearing America that he loved and loathed. The amply illustrated “Mark Twain’s America: A Celebration in Words and Images,” by Harry L. Katz and the Library of Congress, with a poignant foreword by Lewis Lapham, opens with a salute to Twain’s early years and to the Mississippi River, whose surface and depth Twain once likened to a book with “a new story to tell every day.” Chronicling Twain’s peripatetic life in a series of lithographs, wood engravings, newspaper clippings and stunning photographs, many of young Clemens, the volume ischock-full of pictures of such contemporaries as Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and J. P. Morgan. Also plentiful are the illustrations from Twain’s various publications as well as front-page editorial cartoons — there’s a particularly horrid cartoon of Susan B. Anthony — along with pictures by Eadweard Muybridge and Lewis Hine, as well as a little-known Thomas Nast painting of the New Orleans riots of 1866.
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342 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.
Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877.” She is writing a book about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
A version of this review appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adventures of Samuel Clemens. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
