Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

Mark Twain, the American comic genius who portrayed, named, and in part exemplified America’s “Gilded Age,” comes alive in Justin Kaplan’s extraordinary biography.

With brilliant immediacy, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brings to life a towering literary figure whose dual persona symbolized the emerging American conflict between down-to-earth morality and freewheeling ambition. As Mark Twain, he was the Mississippi riverboat pilot, the satirist with a fiery hatred of pretension, and t…