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Product Details
Free Press, May 2006
Trade Paperback, 736 pages
ISBN-10: 0743249011
ISBN-13: 9780743249010
Description
Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.
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"Powers brings enthusiasm and depth of understanding to this richly enjoyable portrait."
-- Independent
"Powers argues that his predecessors tend to be "scholarly critics" in whose efforts the human being, [Twain's] voice and humour go missing. This Pulitzer prize-winning life captivatingly succeeds where they failed, finding a way of writing that is coloured by Twain's verbal larkiness but never merely imitates him."
-- Guardian
"There is nothing jaded or recycled about Ron Powers's masterly portrait....He does justice to a comic, tragic, inspiring American life, and the reader shares his unwillingness to let go when it is time for Twain to die in the final, heart-stopping paragraph."
-- Paperback of the Week, Observer
"Magisterial...almost certainly will become the go-to guide."
-- The Denver Post
"Powers has given us the whole man. We feel we know him, as well as we can, as well as his most perceptive friend and fellow writer William Dean Howells knew him. Along the way Powers brings to vivid life Twain's America...No biography of Mark Twain could do him full justice. Powers' comes as close as you can imagine."
-- Los Angeles Times
"A weighty and witty biography that comes as close as any to providing the essential biography...Powers makes Twain come alive as a three-dimensional, deeply flawed, immensely gifted and wonderfully intriguing writer."
-- The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Barnstable Patriot, October 9, 2009
...publisher in the country, without charge, postal or otherwise, provided only that that publisher did likewise in return,” Ron Powers notes in his recent biography of Mark Twain. “This was the system of the ‘exchange.’” Items from ...
Washington Post, September 3, 2009
...1.5 million copies and offering an electronically signed, leather-bound, limited edition for $1,000. Kennedy collaborated with Ron Powers, co-author of the No. 1 bestseller 'Flags of Our Fathers' and author of 'Mark Twain: A Life.' In a ...
Washington Post, September 3, 2009
...1.5 million copies and offering an electronically signed, leather-bound, limited edition for $1,000. Kennedy collaborated with Ron Powers, co-author of the No. 1 bestseller 'Flags of Our Fathers' and author of 'Mark Twain: A Life.' In a ...
Washington Post, September 2, 2009
...1.5 million copies and offering an electronically signed, leather-bound, limited edition for $1,000. Kennedy collaborated with Ron Powers, co-author of the No. 1 bestseller 'Flags of Our Fathers' and author of 'Mark Twain: A Life.' In a ...
Christian Science Monitor, February 15, 2009
...ill. But most important, he is the man many credit with giving American literature its voice. He is Mark Twain, and thanks to Ron Powers we now have a new biography, Mark Twain: A Life, carefully crafted to help us experience the restless, ...
