Book #102 of 2025: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow Ron Chernow is a consummate biographer, probably best known for popularizing the tale of an overlooked Founding Father into an account that became the basis for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Here he turns his attentions a century forward to the life of author Mark Twain, …
Tag Archives: Mark Twain
Book Review: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider
Book #43 of 2025: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider Mark Twain (1835-1910) didn’t actually write an autobiography. That is to say, he wrote — and dictated — many things over the last forty years of his life that he characterized as part of that great undertaking, but they were disjointed, incomplete, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider”
Book Review: James by Percival Everett
Book #114 of 2024: James by Percival Everett Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an admittedly flawed work: progressively antiracist for its time, with its young white southern protagonist helping a Black man escape from slavery and generally coming to believe in the abolitionist cause more broadly, but with a tendency to …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 