Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—& crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, & scans always every face for Tom & Becky &c. Tom comes, at last, 60 from wandering the world & tends Huck, & together they talk the old times; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mould. They die together.

Mark Twain scribbled this fragment in a journal around 1891, just a few years shy of sixty himself. The contemplated sequel was never written. But much of what Twain did publish around this time is no less dispiriting. “I have started Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator,” he told a publisher, saying he’d written twelve thousand words and promising “additional parts without delay” if “numbers” proved favorable. The work, “Tom Sawyer Abroad” (1894), begins, “Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? . . . No, he wasn’t. It only just p’isoned him for more.”

The “why” behind that book—and such kindred endeavors as “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896)—speaks to the “who” of Samuel Clemens. By then, he had fashioned himself into an avatar of the age: Mark Twain, world-famous and wildly prolific. Just as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Little Women” turned fiction into franchise, Twain turned authorship into celebrity, and celebrity into product. He hawked his name as tirelessly as he did his prose, feeding the same ravenous machine that makes and breaks men in equal measure—though with returns that dwindled over time.

He left behind not just a mountain of material but a life already mythologized. Books, aborted manuscripts, letters, interviews, journals, thousands of magazine and newspaper pieces—it would be a biographer’s dream, if only the subject hadn’t got there first. Twain understood himself as an archive in progress, shaping his persona through constant revisions of his past. “Somebody may be reading this letter 80 years hence,” he wrote to Joseph Twichell in 1880. “And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960,) save yourself the trouble of looking further. . . . No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion.”

Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived with Halley’s Comet—that dirty snowball which flares up when it nears the sun—on November 30, 1835. An older brother had already been named Orion; the cosmos was apparently a family fixation. Sam, the sixth of the Clemens children, was premature, and, according to his mother, a “poor looking object”—an inauspicious début, especially for someone born into a family that specialized in delusions of grandeur.

Sam’s parents were the discount-rack version of Southern aristocracy. Both came from slaveholding families with money, though his father, John Marshall Clemens, had the business instincts of a turnip. He compensated with constant reminders of some dubious tie to the “First Families of Virginia.” By the time Sam was born—in Florida, Missouri—the family’s enslaved property had dwindled to a single nursemaid, Jennie. When he was four, the family settled in Hannibal, Missouri, a river town on the west bank of the Mississippi.

In the recollections of its most famous son, the sleepy white hamlet of Hannibal—roused twice daily by a Black voice calling “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!”—becomes an idyll inseparable from the mystique of boyhood. “Everybody was poor, but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable, and did know it,” Twain wrote in his autobiography. Hannibal, he claimed, “was a little democracy which was full of liberty, equality, and Fourth of July,” combined with an “aristocratic taint.” He added, “I suppose that this state of things was mainly due to the circumstance that the town’s population had come from slave states and still had the institution of slavery with them in their new home.” Still, he reassures us, it was “the mild domestic slavery, not that brutal plantation article.”

In fact, the Clemens family knew exactly how poor they were. John Clemens, having once assumed a county judgeship, invariably styled himself Judge Clemens, but his commercial failures kept piling up. Nor was domestic slavery of an altogether different order. When Jennie resisted her mistress’s abuse, Judge Clemens responded by whipping her with a bridle. According to Twain, Jennie then begged to be sold downriver, having been sweet-talked into it by a local slave trader, William Beebe. Needing the money, the Clemens family complied, though it was “a sore trial,” Twain wrote, “for the woman was almost like one of the family.” That “almost” does heavy lifting. Today, if you find yourself in the vicinity of Hannibal, you can pay around two hundred dollars a night to sleep in “Jenny’s Room” at the Belvedere Inn. The inn’s website describes her as “the dear slave that Mark Twain’s family ‘lost’ to William Beebe in 1840.” Not to worry: “today, this room is an oasis of serenity with a huge king-sized black metal bed.”

Young Sam Clemens—Little Sam, to neighbors and family—didn’t just grow up around slavery; he grew up steeped in Black culture. Summers spent at the homestead of his uncle John Quarles gave him full access to the “negro quarter,” with its songs, superstitions, and lore. These experiences left their mark—especially the tales of an older enslaved man he called Uncle Dan’l, whose hearthside ghost stories stirred in Sam a “creepy joy.”

Knowing what he created from this enchantment, one may be tempted to credit Little Sam with a racial enlightenment, a notion that Twain disavowed. (“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery,” he recalled.) Chernow himself succumbs to the temptation. “Due to prolonged exposure to slavery at the Quarleses’ farm,” he writes, “Twain had a fondness for Black people that didn’t stem from polite tolerance or enforced familiarity.” That’s a misreading of Southern racial dynamics, where intimacy and domination were bound together like strands of rope. Twain, looking back with sharper eyes, acknowledged the unbridgeable distance: “We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of.”

The earliest known photograph of Samuel Clemens, taken in 1850, around his fifteenth birthday, shows a boy in a shirt and tie, holding a printer’s composing stick set with the letters “SAM.” It’s a modest image, marking his shift from printer’s devil to typesetter. Chernow, with a fortune-teller’s fondness for physiognomy, detects “a turbulent gaze,” evidence of “a tough, hardheaded practicality” destined for success. Or maybe it’s just a teen-ager trying not to blink.

Orion merged two papers into the Hannibal Journal; Sam soon joined him, typesetting and contributing the occasional piece, which led to scattered publications in larger outlets. Early columns hold a faint charge of the voice that would become Mark Twain’s. In one piece, he took a swipe at coastal condescension: “Your Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated region, with a population consisting of heathens.” He wasn’t yet Mark Twain, but the borders of American literary geography were already beginning to shift. By 1853, the seventeen-year-old Sam had bolted East, ending up in New York, then Philadelphia. In a letter home, Sam complained that the East was too ethnic, too abolitionist, and too dark for his taste. He still had one foot in Hannibal.

In 1857, Sam stumbled into the job that would shape his identity. Aboard a southbound steamboat—part of some half-baked scheme involving the Amazon River and coca—he met a pilot who offered to teach him, for a fee, the “wonderful science” of river navigation. Sam signed on, and between steering and spinning yarns with his fellow-rivermen he expanded his reading far beyond the boyhood canon of “Robin Hood,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “The Arabian Nights.” Now it was John Milton, Thomas Paine, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare. His journals show him collecting material like a magpie—speech, scenes, characters. During this time, he also picked up his pen name: “mark twain,” riverboat slang for a depth of twelve feet, meaning safe, navigable water.

Then came the Civil War, which sank the steamboat trade and split the Clemens family down the middle. Twain’s war record was brief enough to fit on a cocktail napkin: he joined the Missouri State Guard for two weeks, then bailed. (“I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating,” he wrote later.) Rather than fight over slavery, he headed West, to a different kind of chaos—a raw frontier full of men who, like him, were “smitten with the silver fever.”

In Virginia City, Nevada, Sam Clemens found his groove as a newspaperman; calling him a “journalist,” though, might be a stretch. The papers typically had a casual relationship with facts, and Sam delighted in testing how far he could push things. One of his first pieces for the Territorial Enterprise, dated October 1, 1862, included a complete fabrication: a wagon put “through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history,” as he later recalled in “Roughing It” (1872). Reading it in print the next morning, he had an epiphany: “I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.”

By twenty-six, Sam was fully formed—auburn hair, a mustache, and a wardrobe permanently under siege from smoke, whiskey, and the grime of vagabond living. He covered everything, including crime, theatre (“got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we ‘wrote up’ those plays and operas,” he later recounted), politicians (“dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum”), and the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. His restlessness, his distaste for corrupt and abusive authorities, and his knack for provoking rival journalists had eventually made Virginia City too hot to hold him. In 1864, he relocated to San Francisco, where he placed work in the Golden Era and the Californian—high-toned publications that raised him beyond the category of newspaper hack and toward something recognizably literary.

The West gave him what he needed, but staying longer might have killed him—if not by any of the countless ways the frontier could, then perhaps by his own hand, during one of the depressive spells that sometimes took hold. When Sam set sail for New York from San Francisco, on December 15, 1866, he’d been Mark Twain for more than three years—on the page and, increasingly, in person. He was already angling for a place in New York’s literary scene, aided by friendships with established humorists like Bret Harte and Artemus Ward, who helped shop his work to Eastern editors.

But Twain was outgrowing his mentors. That fall, he’d barnstormed through gold-rush towns, delivering what were loosely called lectures—essentially, standup sets about his travels. Twain was a careful writer posing as a casual talker. The boy who had once listened to enslaved storytellers had become a virtuoso yarn-spinner. Comic monologues paid better than journalism, “and there was less work connected with it,” he later observed. Besides, laughter “was a heavenly sound to me,” he wrote.

The East promised that trifecta writers crave but rarely name outright: money, renown, and prestige, in shifting proportion. New York was no cultural capital when Twain arrived in 1867, and that suited his hustle. As a lecturer, he found a place in the city’s public life; as a correspondent he filed dispatches for various high-profile newspapers. A book was the next step. That year, he published a collection anchored by his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and although the book was politely received, its sales were modest—a success he found vaguely humiliating. The breakthrough came soon after, with a roving assignment aboard the Quaker City, a steamship bound for Palestine. Twain chronicled excursions inland from the Mediterranean to Paris and Rome. Gimlet-eyed about the world’s supposed wonders—Parisians and sacred sites alike—his letters found their form in a second book, which appeared in 1869, titled “The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress.” It was a best-seller, a sensation, and the moment Twain’s voice became not just recognizable but indispensable.

A best-seller wasn’t the only thing that came of the Quaker City cruise. When a fellow-passenger, Charles Langdon, showed Twain a miniature portrait of his twenty-one-year-old sister, Olivia, he was smitten. “To labor to secure the world’s praise, or its blame either,” he later wrote, “seems stale, flat, & unprofitable compared with the happiness of achieving the praise or the abuse of so dear a friend as a wife.” Livy, as he called her, came from a prominent East Coast abolitionist family—cultured, affluent, religious, and wary of the brash humorist now vying for their daughter. Twain pressed his case and finally won their approval. The pair were married in February, 1870.

Within two years, Hartford, Connecticut—where Livy had connections—was his home and his base of operations. The marriage offered Twain not just intimacy but infrastructure: Livy became his editor, his conscience, and his entrée into circles he once mocked. Their thirty-four-year marriage would produce three daughters and a son, who died in infancy. Even as Twain’s home life stabilized, his literary ambitions grew. In 1875, The Atlantic ran the first installment of what became “Life on the Mississippi” (1883). The piece impressed John Hay, Lincoln’s former secretary and a future Secretary of State, who was reared just upriver from Hannibal. “I knew all that, every word of it,” Hay wrote to Twain. “But I could not have remembered one word of it all. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and imagination.”

When the words were flowing, he hardly noticed the effort—a sure sign they’d dry up eventually. “As long as a book would write itself,” he admitted, “I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind.”

What Twain sought was something like automation. He wanted to work without working, a desire hard to square with other writerly particularities of his: he was obsessive about word choice, especially when rendering dialect. And yet he often deferred to others—most often the women in his life—when it came to editing, allowing them to strike what they would.

His writing style was inseparable from the shape his books took, and his fictional instincts were more episodic than architectural. “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel,” he once observed. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was an illustration. Twain wrote much of it in the summer of 1874, as he and his wife prepared to move into a flamboyant Gothic mansion in Hartford, along with two young daughters and a household staff. But the life style came with costs, and one way to raise money was to advertise a book to prospective subscribers, who would pay for it in advance. Then you just had to write it.

At one point, work on the manuscript stalled completely. His tank, he wrote, “was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing.” The freeze came around page 400—a reminder of the economics shaping Twain’s method. With subscription publishing, bulk helped justify the price. As his biographer Justin Kaplan put it, “It forced the author to write to fit and to fill . . . and it conditioned him to think of his writing as a measurable commodity, like eggs and corn.”

Published in 1876, “Tom Sawyer” was printed and distributed in the U.S. by a venture Twain partly owned. It sold respectably but not at the level he’d hoped. The Atlantic called it “a wonderful study of the boy-mind”; others dismissed it as a series of sketches rather than a true novel. Sardonic in tone—its moralists are hypocrites, the church oppressive, and only the rebels are appealing—the book still plays it safe: slavery is all but absent from this version of Hannibal.

Twain worked on “Huckleberry Finn” that summer, at a retreat in upstate New York. But the writing, again, proved fitful. He wrote a few hundred pages before pausing the project around 1880, unsure how to proceed. He was also busy chasing fortune: steam pulleys, marine telegraphs, and the Paige Compositor—a typesetting machine that promised riches and delivered bankruptcy. As Chernow notes, Twain “raged against plutocrats even as he strove to become one.”

It wasn’t until 1882, during a trip back to the Mississippi River to gather material for completing “Life on the Mississippi,” that Twain reconnected with the rhythms and the voices of his youth. In a letter to his friend William Dean Howells the following August, he wrote, “I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn’t name the number of days; I shouldn’t believe it myself.”

The American edition of the novel appeared in 1885 and sold briskly. Still, the halting, fractured writing process helps explain its troubled final section, in which Jim is recaptured and we’re made to endure pages of overworked boyish schemes to rescue him. The commercial pressures to pad may have played a part; so, too, might Twain’s own conflicted relationship with America’s unresolved promises. Either way, it’s a famous misfire. Ernest Hemingway told readers to skip it. Toni Morrison told them not to. Jim’s continued captivity, she argued, manacles the narrative itself. “In its structure,” she wrote, “it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.”

Meanwhile, Twain kept throwing his energy, and his money, into entrepreneurial ventures he was temperamentally unfit to manage. His most lucrative title at one point was a blank book—a patented scrapbook of his own invention. He published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in 1885, to great acclaim. But most ventures failed, none more ruinously than the Paige typesetter. He kept afloat with magazine work, lecture tours, and long stints abroad—partly to save money, partly in search of material. Amid the swirl, he produced “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (1889), a dark satire of technological progress and democratic illusion.

Why did a talent like Twain waste so much time on extraliterary pursuits? The question assumes a distinction he scarcely countenanced between writing and other forms of commercial activity. If there is a constant in his life, it’s his labored obsession with labor-saving. He poured his earnings into schemes meant to spin off money like a perpetual-motion machine. In 1891, amid mounting debts, Twain and his family went into self-imposed exile in Europe, where they remained until the century turned and he found himself able to repay his creditors in full.

These were also the years when Twain’s contradictions began to harden into gleaming marble. He had become, by the turn of the century, not only a household name but a household presence: the white suit, the clipped wit, the aura of rueful American wisdom. When his wife died, in 1904, his private writings grew full of grief, rage, and disillusionment, but he maintained his public persona on the high-paying hustings. The man who once mocked piety had become a moral touchstone; the scold of American pretensions now dined with tycoons.

Chernow, ever scrupulous, does not ignore the complexities, but his caution becomes its own kind of evasion. Apologies accumulate like packing peanuts. Twain said some unfortunate things about Jews, but he also admired them. He didn’t always get race right, but he possessed “enormous goodwill toward the Black community.” It is hard not to read such formulations—careful, cushioning, oddly managerial—as symptoms of a deeper unease.

Nowhere is that unease more apparent than in the book’s handling of Twain’s “angelfish.” Late in life, Twain came, as he wrote, to “collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent.” He gave these “angelfish” nicknames, pins from Tiffany’s, affectionate letters, elaborate instructions. His daughters looked on in quiet dismay. One tried to erase the angelfish from the record. Chernow reports all this; he makes it clear that Twain was never accused of touching them, that the girls came from proper families and never lodged complaints. He also reports the disquiet of contemporaries, the “unhealthy interest” of the correspondence, the sheer volume of it—hundreds of letters, many of them to girls Twain hardly knew. Then Chernow declines to speculate.

That’s something Twain would never have done; he would rather guess than flinch. The psychological reading is obvious: they were innocent and he was damaged. They were bright, giggling tokens of romance, frozen in time. “Romance dies with youth,” he once wrote. “After that, life is a drudge, & indeed a sham.” The angelfish were girls but also projections; an audience but also an idealized self. “The longing of my heart is a fairy portrait of myself,” he once confessed. “I want to be pretty; I want to eliminate facts and fill up the gap with charms.” The wish is revealing—strange and sad, and haunting in ways the biography cannot quite accommodate.

Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-four, with Halley’s Comet in the sky, a happenstance that he’d predicted. He had outlived not only a wife but two grown daughters, and several endings that would have been tidier. By that point, American literature was beginning to regard itself as a tradition. Yet Twain didn’t think in terms of lineages or pantheons; he thought in terms of schemes and side hustles. He lived to be the most quoted man in America—and possibly the most beloved—but what he was by then, and what we want him to be now, is not so easily reconciled.

The heat in Twain’s work comes from the risk it took in imagining freedom through entanglement. Jim, in “Huckleberry Finn,” is both a character and a problem: a caricature who refuses to stay flat, a man rendered with dignity and deepening care, but also within the limits of white fantasy. That Twain knew this—that he played with it and then against it—is part of what makes the novel live. Two recent books lift Jim out of Twain’s frame as a nimble intellect in disguise: “James,” by the novelist Percival Everett, and “Jim,” by the literary scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. These authors don’t send Twain up; they send him soaring.

That creative arena—the one Twain opened up by writing a book that hasn’t finished becoming itself—is one of the few things in American culture that remain usefully unsettled. We’re not done with Jim because Twain wasn’t. Perhaps this is what we want from him still—not sanctity or scandal but a space of comic disorder where the rules of the novel, and the Republic, could be stretched, tested, and maybe gamed. If Twain belongs to anyone now, it’s the writers making mischief in the structures he left behind—not revering him but inhabiting him. He gave us a raft. It’s up to us where we take it. ♦