A Life

Washington

The celebrated Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of America. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life, he carries the reader through Washington's troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian Wars, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention and his magnificent performance as America's first president. 
 
Despite the reverence his name inspires Washington remains a waxwork to many readers, worthy but dull, a laconic man of remarkable self-control. But in this groundbreaking work Chernow revises forever the uninspiring stereotype. He portrays Washington as a strapping, celebrated horseman, elegant dancer and tireless hunter, who guarded his emotional life with intriguing ferocity. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, he orchestrated their actions to help realise his vision for the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency. 
 
Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. This is a magisterial work from one of America's foremost writers and historians.

Ron Chernow

Charming, sympathetic, yet judicious ... this is a model biography, one of the finest of recent years. Chernow's gift for fluency, rivalling Twain's, unstrenuously carries you along, parading before us the many lives of Mark Twain.

...an admirably animated, readable account of one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain’s very American prose.”

The complex life of Mark Twain is told expertly in Pulitzer winner Ron Chernow's comprehensive biography ... Chernow offers a balanced, insightful view of the whole Twain package.

Bestseller Chernow again proves himself among his generation’s finest biographers with this magisterial account of the life of Mark Twain... Chernow’s razor-sharp portrait offers nuanced explorations of Twain’s many contradictions... Amply justifying the considerable page count, this stands as the new definitive biography of the revered author

Mark Twain is a masterful exploration of the magnificent highs and unutterable lows of an American literary genius. Twain himself once said that “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But this one feels like the truth of one man’s star-crossed life

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Chernow, best known for his authoritative works on such political figures as Hamilton, Washington, and Grant, here examines the life of one of our most celebrated literary figures with equally remarkable results ... Chernow is an exceptional portraitist, adding depth and shadow to bring his subject fully to life. The impeccable research blends seamlessly into a narrative that examines Twain in all his guises: devoted family man, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, and inventor. Like his subject, Chernow has a keen ear for the perfect quote, insult, and witty rejoinder. This monumental achievement will stand as the definitive life of Mark Twain

Chernow's Mark Twain flows like the Mississippi River, its prose propelled by Mark Twain’s own exuberance.

Twain presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself ... Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing

[An] exceptional biography that devours the life’s work of the perfect American writer and lays bare the unfortunate reality of an imperfect American life ... an exquisitely written, deeply researched volume about an intriguing, complex, contradictory, intelligent, and often exaggerated literary stylist

Chernow writes with such ease and clarity that even long sections on, say, Twain’s business ventures prove horribly fascinating ... [his] book is deeply absorbing throughout and likely to succeed the excellent earlier lives by Justin Kaplan and Ron Powers as the standard biography

In his biography of the famed satirist, Ron Chernow tracks, with patience and care, Twain’s journey over nearly eight tumultuous decades. Mr. Chernow’s tale is enlivened by blazing quotes from Twain’s prodigious interviews, diaries and letters

A maximalist portrait of ... a man split in two, a creature of incessant divisions

Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influen­tial, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Mark Twain went west and accepted a job at the local newspaper, writing dis­patches that attracted attention for their brashness and humour. It wasn’t long until the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance.In this rich and nuanced portrait of Twain, Ron Chernow brings his powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a jour­nalist, satirist, and performer, and a family man, Twain went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the epicentre of American culture, emerging as the nation’s most notable political pundit and the only white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him and led him and his family to nine years of exile between London, France, Germany and Italy. During this time, he lost his wife and two daughters – the last stage of his life marked by heartache, politi­cal crusades, and eccentric behaviour that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, includ­ing thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow here captures the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in literary history, reminding us why Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated and quoted over a hundred years after his passing.

Ron Chernow

Praise for Mark Twain

Charming, sympathetic, yet judicious ... this is a model biography, one of the finest of recent years. Chernow's gift for fluency, rivalling Twain's, unstrenuously carries you along, parading before us the ...

...an admirably animated, readable account of one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain’s very American prose.”

The complex life of Mark Twain is told expertly in Pulitzer winner Ron Chernow's comprehensive biography ... Chernow offers a balanced, insightful view of the whole Twain package.

Charming, sympathetic, yet judicious ... this is a model biography, one of the finest of recent years. Chernow's gift for fluency, rivalling Twain's, unstrenuously carries you along, parading before us the ...

...an admirably animated, readable account of one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain’s very American prose.”

The complex life of Mark Twain is told expertly in Pulitzer winner Ron Chernow's comprehensive biography ... Chernow offers a balanced, insightful view of the whole Twain package.

Charming, sympathetic, yet judicious ... this is a model biography, one of the finest of recent years. Chernow's gift for fluency, rivalling Twain's, unstrenuously carries you along, parading before us the ...

...an admirably animated, readable account of one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain’s very American prose.”

The complex life of Mark Twain is told expertly in Pulitzer winner Ron Chernow's comprehensive biography ... Chernow offers a balanced, insightful view of the whole Twain package.

Books by Ron Chernow

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