Mark Twain was first encountered by the reviewer as the avuncular, white-haired visage joining the purple-clad Robert Louis Stevenson and the doleful Edgar Allan Poe in childhood card games of ...

Book Review Mark Twain By Ron Chernow Penguin Press: 1,200 pages, $45 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

More than a century after his death, Mark Twain remains one of the most recognizable voices in American literature—the author of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), “Life on the ...

Twain’s upbringing put him in close contact with black Americans. The Missouri of Twain’s youth was a slave state. His father owned and rented people. His mother took a dim view of abolitionism.