He made America laugh. He made America think. And Mark Twain did all that despite a lifetime of challenges — including too much death in his immediate family and a long litany of financial hardships that nearly crushed him.
The prolific biographer Ron Chernow has chronicled the Missouri author's life in a new book titled simply "Mark Twain," that’s already hit the top of The New York Times best-sellers list.
Chernow told KCUR's Up To Date that Twain can be credited with transforming American literature by writing about the individuals and landscapes of the Midwest, which up until that point enjoyed little representation in fiction.
"The literary world had been very much dominated by kind of eastern seaboard elite, and here he's capturing all this kind of wild, throbbing energy out there in the Heartland," said Chernow.
- Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer
