Inside the mind of Mark Twain: Obsessive author and arrogant genius

In the late 19th century, Mark Twain was arguably the most famous author in the world, with classics like “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and “Life on the Mississippi” (1883) cementing his status as a cultural icon.But despite his accomplishments, Twain seethed at the idea that anyone might criticize him.For future editions of the book that rocketed him to fame, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain planned a “classic author’s revenge fantasy,” writes Ron Chernow in his new, sprawling biography, “Mark Twain” (Penguin Press), out now.

Twain insisted on including a “prefatory remark” that identified two newspaper editors that he particularly loathed as inspiration for his young fictional protagonist.“In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, & origin,” wrote Twain, Huck Finn was meant as a “counterpart of these two gentlemen as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago.” Twain was eventually talked out of the vindictive plan by his wife.It’s a side of the author that rarely gets remembered.During his life, Twain wrote 30 books, several thousand magazine articles and some 12,000 letters, but Twain’s foremost creation “may well have been his own inimitable personality,” writes Chernow. He’s become an “emblem of Americana . . .

a humorous man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye, an avuncular figure sporting a cigar and a handlebar mustache.”But the truth wasn’t quite so sanitized.Twain also had a “large assortment of weird sides to his nature,” writes Chernow.Long before he became Mark Twain, he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Mo., a “white town drowsing in the sunshine” on the banks of the Mississippi, as Twain would later immortalize.

He created the Mark Twain pen name not just as a way to escape his many creditors but as “the ultimate act of reinvention, the start of an attempt to mythologize his...