The Adventures of Samuel Clemens

Some people live several lives. Mark Twain lived half a dozen. As a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, he saw his family reduced to living in cramped quarters above a drugstore. As a world-renowned author, he and his wife built an 11,500-square-foot home with 25 rooms, balconies, turrets, and marble floors. In Twain’s impoverished 20s, he traveled to Nevada by stagecoach, sleeping atop mailbags. Decades later, he hired private railway cars. Before writing the books that made him famous, he served in a Confederate militia, searched for gold in the Sierra Nevada, and worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and what today is Hawaii. By the end of Twain’s life, the czar of Russia and several other monarchs would happily receive him, Andrew Carnegie would invite him for dinner, and Woodrow Wilson (then the president of Princeton University) would play miniature golf with him. To borrow a line from his contemporary Walt Whitman, Twain’s life truly contained multitudes.