Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion ...

Historian Ron Chernow’s latest work may surprise readers who know him best for the book which inspired the musical “Hamilton” ...

Mark Twain gave us inimitable characters such as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He was no less creative in styling himself as ...

Ron Chernow has written biographies about great men before but in Mark Twain he tackled a larger than life character known ...

Chernow specializes in big American lives. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of George Washington, and another of his ...

But then he never would have become Mark Twain — with all the heartache, frustration and dadgum bother (as he might put it) ...

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

From his childhood, Samuel Clemens was devoted to showmanship, exaggeration and the joy of a tall tale.