Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
(Penguin Press)
May 3, 2025
WAS THE ALTER EGO of Samuel Langhorne Clemens an antisemite or not? The question has been bandied about ever since Twain penned the 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews,” based on his observations about how Jews were treated in the Habsburg Empire. While he called Jewish people unpatriotic for not joining the U.S. military — even though they did in a greater per capita number than other groups — he later retracted that statement. This new biography by Chernow (whose earlier tome on Alexander Hamilton directly inspired the stage musical) comes in at exactly 1,200 pages, covering Twain’s birth shortly after Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835 to the death that came soon after its next appearance 74 years later — as the increasingly eccentric writer predicted. Marc Weisblott
