Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography

Mark Twain's life as told by more than 200 contemporaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and many more.

A master storyteller, Mark Twain inspired his friends, family, fellow authors, and others to reminisce about him at every stage of his life and everywhere he lived. In Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography, Gary Scharnhorst transcribes and annotates over two hundred memoirs by people who knew Twain personally—boyhood friends in Hannibal; family members; mining partners and fellow journalists in Nevada and California; neighbors in Hartford and New York. Commentaries from editors, publishers, lecture managers, and politicians of all stripes—from Prime Ministers and Presidents to grassroots activists—grace these pages. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Jean Webster, Maxim Gorky, Ambrose Bierce, Booker T. Washington, and P. T. Barnum are all heard from. The greatness of these recollections are the breadth of experience, intimacy, and depth of understanding from Twain’s contemporaries, notable and otherwise.

These anecdotes chronicle Twain’s brief service in a Missouri militia during the Civil War; his residences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Florence; his campaigns against colonialism in Africa and Asia and US imperialism in the Philippines; his advocacy for international copyright; his opinions on issues of race and ethnicity; and his triumphant trip to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1907. This mosaic of his life should interest general readers, teachers of Twain’s writings, and specialists in American literature.