Mark Twain

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow follows Samuel Langhorne Clemens from a Missouri childhood spent dreaming of Mississippi steamboats to fame as Mark Twain. After the Civil War interrupted his career as a river pilot, Clemens went west to the Nevada Territory and wrote newspaper dispatches noted for their brashness and humor. He became a journalist, satirist and lecturer, made a home with his wife and three daughters in Hartford, and wrote his novels of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn there. Chernow also covers his political commentary and his engagement with slavery, the business ventures that bankrupted him, nine years in Europe to save money, and the deaths of his wife and two daughters. Penguin Press published it in 2025.

Barack Obama picked it as one of his favorite books of summer 2025, describing a thorough life of one of the country's most important writers and social critics.