For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.
I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.
I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.
Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.
You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.
Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is.