Thursday, July 10, 2025
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Ron Chernow delivered the keynote address at the Gold Coast Book Fair on May 16, captivating a full auditorium at LIU Post with a spirited exploration of Mark Twain’s life, legacy — and contradictions. The presentation came on the heels of the release of Chernow’s newest book, “Mark Twain,” a glimpse into the life of America’s greatest humorist.
Former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, the owner of Theodore’s Books, in Oyster Bay, and the founder of the book fair, introduced Chernow and explained why he created the event, emphasizing the importance of not only supporting books and reading, but also putting Long Island on the map as a literary hotspot.
“Long Island is frequently overlooked as the literary treasure that it is,” Israel said. “(Chernow) joins us for the kickoff event of an extraordinary weekend celebrating our history, our democracy and our love of literature.”
Chernow opened with a personal anecdote from 1974, when he saw the actor Hal Holbrook perform his legendary one-man show as Mark Twain.
“Holbrook stood up there for 90 minutes in the trademark Mark Twain white suit with the cigar, with the unruly mustache, and he spouted one political witticism after another. And I was just laughing hysterically,” Chernow recalled. “I still remember many of them, of Mark Twain saying there’s no distinctly Native American criminal class except for Congress. Sorry, Congressman Israel.”
Chernow noted the ongoing relevance of Twain’s caustic humor, which he often aimed at political corruption. He added that Twain’s digs at the Gilded Age crooks of his times “are still very relevant today.”
The biographer, best known for his works on Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant, said he was drawn to Twain because of the profound duality in his life. He pointed to a Ken Burns documentary that opened his eyes to the “life of tremendous personal tragedy and complexity.”
Twain found the humor in the serious, the tragic and even the sacred aspects of life.
Chernow said that Twain liked to intentionally shock people with his escapades. “He even promised at one event that he would, quote, ‘devour a child in the presence of the audience, if some lady will kindly volunteer an infant for the occasion.’”
Chernow delved into Twain’s early years, describing his father as a cold, distant man who left young Sam Clemens with a lifelong fear of poverty. In contrast, Twain’s emotional foundation came from his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, a lively, humorous woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to her son in wit and manner.
“Twain had been a premature baby,” Chernow said, recalling a favorite exchange. “Years later, Twain asked his mother whether she had been uneasy about his health. ‘Yes, the whole time,’ she agreed. And Twain persisted, ‘Afraid I wouldn’t live?’ And then, with a deadpan worthy of her son, she replied, ‘No, afraid you would.’”
The future author’s early jobs included working as a printer’s apprentice for his brother, Orion’s, newspaper, where, Chernow said, Twain began writing “satiric scripts,” his first literary ventures.
Chernow also described Twain’s fantastical plan to become a coca magnate after reading an account of Inca laborers chewing coca leaves. Twain boarded a boat to New Orleans with dreams of wealth, only to find there was no passage to Brazil. Instead he met a steamboat pilot named Horace Bixby who offered to train him. Twain later earned a pilot’s license and a salary “equivalent to that of the Vice President of the United States.”
The Civil War ended Twain’s steamboat career, and after a brief and undistinguished stint in a Confederate militia — “I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating,” Twain quipped — he headed west with Orion. In Nevada Twain became city editor of the Territorial Enterprise, where his pen name was born. “For his pen name, he adopted a term from his steamboat days, Mark Twain,” Chernow explained. “What Mark Twain meant was two fathoms, or 12 feet of water.”
Chernow described Twain’s colorful battles at the paper with rival journalists, hoaxes, and the wild frontier humor that shaped his voice.
Though he is most remembered for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” Twain’s best-selling work during his lifetime was “The Innocents Abroad,” a travelogue satirizing Europe and the Holy Land.
“Suddenly, a new voice in American letters emerged,” Chernow said. “It was brash and cynical, irreverent, exuberant and totally hilarious.”
Twain had no patience for the Old World’s art and saints. He called Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel “a nightmare” and described da Vinci’s “Last Supper” as inferior to the copies being painted in front of it.
The author’s life changed on that same European tour when he glimpsed a miniature portrait of a young woman named Olivia Langdon, who became his wife.
Closing on a poignant note, Chernow remarked on the challenges of writing a biography of a man who once said, “The biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But Twain’s contradictions — his joy and sorrow, comedy and critique — continue to challenge and enchant.
Israel and Chernow spent the next 30 minutes in a Q&A-style-discussion, covering topics ranging from Twain’s opinion of Theodore Roosevelt (Twain thought Roosevelt was “a clown with the whole world for an audience”) to Chernow’s use of index cards when researching (he used more than 25,000 when writing “Mark Twain”).
“’I’m not an American, but the American,’ Twain once wrote,” Chernow added with a smile. “Arrogant, but perhaps true.”
