Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show this week, on Thursday, we'll talk with Tony-nominated actor Jasmine Amy Rogers about the new Broadway Musical Boop!, in which Jasmine brings the animated flapper icon Betty Boop to life on stage. Tomorrow, we'll talk about the fitness brand SoulCycle and a new podcast that explores how it became an obsession for many New Yorkers. The pod is called Cult of Body & Soul.

Then later in the week, we'll also discuss a very important documentary called For Venida, For Kalief, which explores the efforts of Venida Browder to seek justice for her son Kalief, who died by suicide in 2015 after spending more than 800 days in solitary confinement on Rikers Island. That's happening this Thursday. That's our plan. Now let's get back into today's show with this month's Full Bio conversation.

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Alison: Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. This month, we are discussing Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. Chernow has written biographies of Alexander Hamilton, President Ulysses S. Grant, and won the Pulitzer for his book Washington: A Life about our first president. Mark Twain, AKA Samuel Clemens, was the first literary celebrity.

Chernow writes, "Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being living a cloistered existence and thrust himself into the hurly burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heartland. Probably no other American author has had such an eventful life." Today, we'll get into that life. It all started for him in Missouri. Samuel was left fatherless at 11 years old. He left to become a printer's apprentice. He also worked on a steamboat, traveled west with his brother, and found some success in writing. His breakthrough was a story called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. Let's get into today's full bio with Ron Chernow, the author of Mark Twain.

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Alison: How did you get into writing biographies, Ron?

Ron: I started out as a journalist. For 10 years, I worked as a freelance magazine writer. Then for 3 years, I worked for a public policy foundation called the Twentieth Century Fund. They had to change the name at the millennium.

[laughter]

Ron: I was in charge of financial policy studies. I was reading a lot about Wall Street history and reading about the old Wall Street of a century ago. There was all these kind of very private, clubby, very discriminatory firms. This was in the 1980s. Wall Street had become this razzle-dazzle world of huge conglomerates. I was curious how one world had changed into another, and I realized that if I just did a straight history of Wall Street, it would be a very tedious fact sheet.

I got this idea, which actually worked, that if I took a family or firm that had been at the center of everything that happened on Wall Street, I would be able to engage people in the passions and the interests of these people. Turned out to be the JP Morgan family and banking empire. One of the things that I discovered that really hooked me on biography is that when you involve people in a story, when they get caught up in the emotions of these characters, they're able to absorb enormous amount of information, and you can give them the history lesson that if it was presented just as straight history, they would not be able to absorb.

Alison: Let's learn about Mark Twain. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 to Jane Lampton and to John Marshall Clemens, who died when Samuel was just 11 years old. How did his parents meet?

Ron: They had met in Southern Kentucky, and they were very different types because he was a cold and aloof person. She had just been jilted by a young doctor. She was spirited and vivacious, loved parties, loved to dance. Turned out to be a very cold and loveless marriage. Mark Twain grows up with these two very different examples of parents. He said very interesting things about his father. He said his relationship with his father, they existed in a state of armed neutrality. He said, "My knowledge of my father amounted to little more than an introduction," a rather chilly way of describing his relationship with his father, which gives you some sense of how cold and forbidding he felt his father was.

The mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, she was spirited, she was vivacious. She loved any kind of spectacle, whether it was a circus or a funeral. Young Sam said that she had a disposition of pure sunshine. He said that she was just pure gold. You could see that he gets all of his emotional sustenance from mother. The mother has a wit that is very reminiscent of Mark Twain. In fact, Mark Twain was born in a town called Florida, Missouri. He was a premature baby. He was a sickly runt.

In later years, he was having a conversation with his mother, and he said to his mother, "You must have been the entire time, when I was a baby, worried about my health, whether I would survive." She said, "Yes, I was the entire time." Twain said to her, "You were afraid I wouldn't make it?" She said to him with the deadpan exactly that Mark Twain would do, she would say, "No, I was afraid that you would."

[laughter]

Alison: It's funny because in the book, you say that Samuel was like he was all Lampton-

Ron: Yes, absolutely.

Alison: -as his description of him.

Ron: I know. [laughs]

Alison: When his parents were together, when he was born, how did they end up in Missouri?

Ron: They had been in eastern Tennessee, which is a very mountainous area. The father failed at one job after another as a storekeeper, as a postmaster. The fact that his father failed at so many businesses, I think, left a permanent imprint on then Sam Clemens, later Mark Twain, because it left him with the dread of poverty that never left him. It made him not only want to be well off, he always was looking for a killing for the big bonanza, and I think it traces back to this dread of poverty that was created in his childhood.

He was born in the town of Florida, Missouri, which still located is all the way up in the northeastern corner of Missouri. He said it was a town of 100 people, so that when he was born, he increased the population by 1%. He said there's no one else who ever did something so remarkable, not even Shakespeare. [laughs] Then he was lucky. When he was 4, they moved to the town of Hannibal, still a very small town in an isolated rural area, but on the Mississippi.

Mark Twain's boyhood home, which is still there to visit, when you walk out the door and you turn left, they're just a block or two away, there's this broad, magnificent shining waterway. Once or twice a day, a little puff of smoke would appear in the distance, and they would hear the steamboat whistle. When the steamboat would dock, and the steamboat would bring the whole world of people in commerce into town, suddenly this town would come alive. As Mark Twain said, the steamboat pilots were royalty on the river, and of course, he ends up becoming one.

Alison: I'm curious, who took on the role of a paternal figure in his life after his father passed away when he was just 11?

Ron: It's an excellent question. Let me tell you how he became a steamboat pilot, because that'll answer the question. He was in his early 20s. He had read a book by a man named William Herndon who had made a 4,000-mile trek through the Amazon valley. At one point in the book, Herndon talked about the fact that the Incas and the Andes chewed coca leaves, which gave them patience and prodigious strength to work in the mines. Sam decided that he was going to go to Brazil, monopolize the worldwide coca trade, and join the ranks [laughs] of the plutocratic rich.

He takes a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He said that when he got to New Orleans, he found out that there was no boat to power Brazil as he had expected, and none was expected to leave during that century. [laughs] On the boat, there was a very experienced pilot named Horace Bixby who offers to teach Sam the steamboat trade for $500, which was a considerable amount at that time. As we all know from Tom Sawyer, Sam had been a very lackadaisical boy who much more enjoyed playing hooky than going to school. Suddenly, he is in training to become a pilot, and so along this 1300-mile stretch of the river, he has to study and master every snag, every shore, every--

What I say in the book is that it gave him a structure and a discipline to his life that he had not had before. Bixby, although he loved Sam like a father, was a very tough taskmaster, which is frankly what he needed at that point because he was this rascally mischievous kid who suddenly is taking very seriously this job. The riverboat pilots were like royalty, and their salary was equal to the salary of the vice president of the United States. Here he is in his 20s, and he later said, "It was the darling time of my existence. There's never been period like it since," which must have been news later on to his wife and three daughters.

[laughter]

Alison: Oh, she's got stuff coming. Don't worry. My guest is Ron Chernow. We are talking about his book Mark Twain. It is our choice for Full Bio. What did Samuel Clemens, before he got on that steamboat, when he was a little kid, what did he want to be when he grew up?

Ron: I don't think that there was any specific ambition that he had at that point. One thing, Alison, to understand about him as a writer, a writer today is likely a person, when they're a teenager, they start scribbling stories, they fantasize being a writer, they go up to a fancy college, they take a [laughs] creative writing course, or they go to the Iowa Workshop or whatever. This is not that kind of story. His father dies when he's 11, he ends up not long after leaving school and working as a printer's devil to his older brother Orion, who has a newspaper. He said, significantly, as printer's devil, he said, acres of good and bad literature passed beneath his gaze.

As any writer will tell you, the best experience, best training you could have as a writer is to read a lot of [laughs] bad literature, because then you don't make those mistakes. He's very much just driven by fortune. As people who read the book will see, he's a printer's devil. Then he's a steamboat pilot. He's briefly in the Confederate militia, then he's a miner, then he's a journalist. He stumbles into one thing after another. It amounts to a person who is very versatile, who has had all sorts of different experiences, but he never, when he was younger, had a specific blueprint in mind of what he wanted his life to be.

Alison: I'm glad you brought up his brother Orion.

Ron: Orion.

Alison: Orion. Thank you. There were six siblings. Most of the children died as children, as teens. There was Samuel, his older brother, and his sister Pamela.

Ron: Pamela. For some reason, they all had strange pronunciations. [laughs]

Alison: Pamela?

Ron: Forgive me for correcting you. [laughs]

Alison: No, thank you. Please do. Would you share a story about his two siblings that would explain something about Samuel Clemens?

Ron: He had a younger brother named Henry, whom he adored. He said that aside from his wife, he had a more perfect understanding with Henry than anyone else. Now, Sam was already working as a pilot on the river, and Henry got a job on one of the steamboats and was in a steamboat accident. The boiler blew up, threw Henry and all the passengers into the river.

Now, the interesting thing about the story is this: that Mark Twain had had a dream prior to this explosion of walking into a room and seeing Henry in a casket with white flowers and then a single red flower in the middle. His brother is injured in this accident, and he goes to, I think it was Memphis, where all of the surviving passengers were taken, and his brother died there. The letters that Sam wrote to his family are heart-wrenching. He said, "There are gray hairs in my head where there were none before."

It was a love, I think, of an unusual intensity between two brothers. Here was somebody who was, on the one hand, capable of fantastic passion and loyalty to people, and on the other hand, numerous points in his life was a captive of vendettas. He was just a master of vendetta. He would have a vengeance that would never end. He lost the brother that he most loved. His older brother, Orion, who was 10 years older, was-- [chuckles] Orion wanted to be a writer and an author. Imagine having [laughs] Mark Twain as your younger brother.

Alison: As your younger brother?

Ron: Orion was a dreamer, he was very impractical and headed the clouds. He changed his politics every week, and he changed his religion every week, but he was actually Sam's first boss. He had promised to pay Sam money, this printer's devil. Sam never saw the money, and he was permanently bitter towards his brother. His brother really saves him the following way. He loves the life on the river. Then the Civil War breaks out, shuts commerce on the river for two weeks. Mark Twain is in a pro-Confederate ragtag militia in eastern Missouri.

He said that he knew more about retreating than the man who invented [laughs] retreating. He doesn't cover himself with glory. He's very conflicted about the whole conflict. He is opposed to secession. At this point, he's not necessarily opposed to slavery, though. Then, luckily for him, Orion has just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. He brings Sam along to be his private secretary, but when they get there, there's not any secretarial work immediately to be done, so Sam decides that he's going to become a miner.

They were in Virginia City, which was the site of the Comstock Lode, the biggest silver mining boom in American history, and Sam goes out there with pickaxe. He loses every penny. Then he gets an offer to be the city editor of a newspaper there called the Territorial Enterprise. Now, he was so broke that he later said that if he had been offered a job translating the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would have taken it.

Alison: Take it.

Ron: He becomes a city editor. He would write these satiric scripts for his brother's paper, so he had had things published before. He'd even had some things published in the Territorial Enterprise under the name of Josh. Suddenly, he's the city editor. He has no real background as journalist. He said his first day in the office, he was filled with panic because he had no idea how he was going to fill up his first column. Then he said, "A desperado shot a man in a saloon, and joy returned once more."

[laughter]

Ron: That became his first article. Then he writes these articles that are full of hoaxes and told tales. He engages in rivalry, swapping insults with other journalists around town. You can see him beginning to come to life as a writer. He has his own cynical, anarchic sense of humor and a fantastic verbal richness.

Alison: You've been listening to our Full Bio conversation with Ron Chernow. We'll learn more about Mark Twain's life as husband and father after the break.

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Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. This month, we are discussing Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. We've arrived at the sweetest part of Mark Twain's life, the love story he had with Olivia Louise Langdon. She was his wife, his editor, his etiquette teacher. They had four children together, one boy who died as a baby, and three girls survived. Twain said of love, "Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes. None knows whence and cannot explain itself." Here's Ron Chernow.

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Alison: He knew a man named Charles Langdon who had a sister, Olivia, "Livy." They were heirs. I believe it was a coal fortune. Was that correct?

Ron: Yes, it was mostly coal, timber, and railroads.

Alison: From reading your book, you get a sense that Sam and Livy were a true love story.

Ron: True love story, yes. I think she saved him. He was about 10 years older, and two significant things when they met. He had met Livy's brother, Charlie Langdon, on the Quaker City. It was this cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. He had a little ivory miniature of her. Twain said from the time he saw this kind of beautiful, intelligent, sensitive face staring out from that Livy Langdon was never out of his mind. Indeed, she became his adored wife.

Now, Livy was very, very fragile, one. Two, she was an heiress, and so the Langdons, who were a remarkable family, were naturally very protective of Livy. Mark Twain, in order to woo her, resorted to the best weapon in his arsenal, which was words. He sends Livy 200 long letters. She actually numbers them. [laughs] There are so many of them. This goes on for a couple of years, and finally, the Langdons realize that this tornado that has swept into their lives is not going to go away.

Mr. Langdon asked Mark Twain, who had lived in Nevada and in San Francisco, if he could have some of his friends out west write letters of recommendation for him. Mr. Langdon calls in Twain and says that he's gotten the 10 letters, that all of them say the same thing, that Mark Twain was idle and lecherous [laughs] and drunken and disorganized. He says to Mark Twain, he said, "Don't you have a friend in the world?" Mark Twain shrugs his shoulders and says, "Apparently not." Then Mr. Langdon says to him, "I know you better than they do. Take the girl."

He blesses the marriage, and it was such a happy marriage. I went through God knows how many letters between them. There was scarcely a letter that she wrote to him that did not end. "I worship you. I adore you. I love you." The love was fully reciprocated. There was never any kind of sense of scandal about his womanizing or anything like that. That marriage really gave him a life because she was very refined socially. She had an exquisite sense of tact and propriety. [laughs]

Alison: I was going to say, what did she give to him as a man?

Ron: In two words, anger management.

[laughter]

Ron: He has a very, very volatile personality. I can't tell you how many letters there are that Mark Twain wrote, like the morning after a dinner party, saying, "The madam tells me I may have been a bit brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I want to apologize." If he sat down and he wrote a very impetuous, angry letter, which he was willing to do, she trained him to stuff it in the drawer and wait, and then write another one when he cooled off. Even she made him presentable in polite society.

The thing that I adored most was that they had a system of color-coded cards. At a dinner party, she flashed a card that was red. It meant, "Would you stop monopolizing the woman on your right?" If it was blue, it meant, "Are you going to sit there all night and not talk?" [laughs] The daughters called this mama dusting off papa. [laughs]

Alison: As well, they should.

Ron: Yes. He said very accurately, he said, "Livy edited my manuscripts, and then she edited me." He was this backwater town, this rather kind of rough backwater town, and he really didn't know how to behave.

Alison: It's interesting, though, because there was a part where you said that his relationship with his mother taught him how to trust women. It seemed like that's what he believed was his relationship with Livy as well.

Ron: Yes. In fact, one thing that I noticed in the book, Mark Twain was extremely sociable. As he goes on the years, it seems like he's the toastmaster at every banquet in town. I mean, he knows hundreds, he knows thousands of people. I was struck by the paucity of two friends that he had, Reverend Joseph Twichell and Hartford William Dean Howells, the novelist. He doesn't have a lot of really intimate male friends. I think that because of that upbringing, he can open up with women, and women enable him to express a much fuller, much richer range of emotions than with men.

Also, as he said that he was not demonstrative. He only saw his parents kiss once, I think, when one of the children died. The daughters said that even when Mark Twain was with his wife, if he held her hand, he would have this kind of sheepish smile on his face. He really had not learned how to do that from his upbringing. I think that because of certainly the cold father, Livy was very, very affectionate and I think just opened him up emotionally. Although it is still a weakness of his writing in general, the failure to portray mature women. He loves writing about teenage girls, but not mature women, the way he loves writing about mature men. Pretty wild. [chuckles]

Alison: Most people in our area will think of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford. First of all, they lived in that house, yes?

Ron: They lived in that house. I don't know if there was any other writer in the 19th century who was living in that kind of Gilded Age splendor. The house had 25 rooms, 11,500 [laughs] square feet, that had a very loyal staff of six servants. They were living in almost inconceivable grandeur.

Alison: They were sort of 1 percenty, a little bit. [chuckles]

Ron: Very much so. What people often misunderstand about Mark Twain, his first novel, which he co-wrote with Charles Dudley Warner, was entitled The Gilded Age. It was that book, that title, that gave us the Gilded Age, because in his writings, he was constantly satirizing the plutocrats of his day. People somehow imagine that he was not one of them, but as I say in the book is that when he was not satirizing the plutocrats, he was doing absolutely everything in his power to become one of them. He was as money mad as any of the characters that he [laughs] satirized, maybe more so.

Alison: It was interesting to see how many servants they had.

Ron: Yes. Also, it was a very difficult situation for Livy. Of course, Livy had grown up a rich kid, but they had a very active social life, very lavish dinner parties. She'd been very frail and very sickly when she was a girl. She never completely outgrew that, and it was very, very taxing on her. Their social life was so active that even with a house full of servants, she was supervising them. She wrote a letter that has a real kind of feminist--

She writes an angry letter to her mother and says, "A woman nowadays has to know how to dress, know how to bring up the children, how to cook and socialize, how to be a patron of the arts, how to sit on a philanthropic work." She has this long, long list of things that she's expected to do. Really, the burden of not only taking care of that house, but of overseeing this very active social life, is all falling on her. Mark Twain is aware that it's taking a toll on her, both psychologically and physically, but it's like with a lot of things, he can't help himself.

Alison: They had three daughters who lived past their teenage years and a son who passed away at 19 months. He was their firstborn. How did the death of their son affect the family?

Ron: Oh, it was terrible. Langdon was his name, named after the in-laws. Langdon was late to walk. He was late to talk. It's funny, Alison, because we all know that infant mortality was much higher in the 19th century. Sometimes people will say, "They got used to it. They were tougher than we were." When you think of the morning, the terrible mourning that they went through, particularly Livy, she wrote a very sad letter. She said, "I feel my life is to be along one long road to the cemetery." She had a real sense for mortality.

It took them a long time to recover from it. I think that they were smart. They immediately then went on and had three daughters who were healthy, at least at first, but this is a family that was plagued. Plagued by bad health. It's a strange story because, on the one hand, it's all these kind of literary triumphs, and I think people will find themselves, I hope, laughing throughout the book, but it's also a life that is filled with an unusual amount of personal calamities. Spoiler alert. By the time Mark Twain dies, she not only buried a son and a brother, but he's also buried two of his three daughters and his wife. He just went through just insufferable amount of sadness.

Alison: It's interesting because his daughters were Susy and Jean, but I think we know the most about Clara because she survived the longest. I wondered, was there something else? There's a reason that we know more about Clara. Maybe not?

Ron: Clara was the middle daughter. Mark Twain dies in 1910. By then, the two other daughters had died. Clara survives until 1962 and writes a lot of books. She had a very strangely, competitive relationship with her father. She always complained that she didn't like being Mark Twain's daughter. She said that if she walked into a room or a reception, that's exactly how she was perceived. She said, "I was always like a footstool stool in the room." There's always quiet resentment against her father.

She was talented. She pursued a career, first as a concert pianist and then as a singer. I'll tell you something about their relationship. When she made her debut singing recital in Connecticut, she agonized over whether or not to have her father come out on stage at the end. He, of course, wanted to. He loved attention. She goes back and forth, and finally she says to him, "Okay, you can come out at the end." Then he comes out [chuckles] on stage at the end, and he starts talking and talking and talking. He starts talking about how when he made his debut as a lecturer in San Francisco in 1866, and he goes on and on and on with all these funny stories.

In the subsequent days, the reviews of the recital were all about, "Mark Twain talks [laughs] about making his debut in San Francisco." There was nothing that, as he himself admitted, he had an appetite for notice and notoriety, even when he was a boy. He said, "Celebrity is a thing that a boy wants more than anything." He said he would be a clown in the circus or a pirate or sell himself to Satan in order to attract attention. Throughout his life, that never changes. He wants to attract attention. Clara always felt herself in this massive shadow cast by her father, who was the most famous American domestically, but also worldwide.

Alison: On tomorrow's Full Bio, Mark Twain on politics, race, and gender.