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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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Dangerous Water - A Biography Of The Boy Who Became Mark Twain (Paperback, New Ed)
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Dangerous Water - A Biography Of The Boy Who Became Mark Twain (Paperback, New Ed)
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An eloquent portrait of the American Renaissance's greatest writer
as a young man. Powers is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
eight books. His expertise in popular culture, mass media, history,
and the American small town is in evidence here as in Far from
Home: Life and Loss in Two American Towns (1991). Powers, who also
grew up in Hannibal, Mo., sees Mark Twain as America's first
popular, media-fed superstar who knew how to dress for the photo
op. Powers exposes Clemens's mirth for the flip side of the man's
many tragedies. "Sammy" was a premature baby and sickly toddler who
grew up into the barefoot boy who showed off for the girl we'd know
as Becky Thatcher. Far from a protected and fanciful Tom Sawyer,
Clemens, as a three-year-old sleepwalker, tugged at his sister's
blanket a few days before she died. She was one of several siblings
Sam would lose. Unsuccessful but not evil like Huck Finn's papy,
Samuel's father was relatively bland, passing on only his tendency
toward bad debts and investments. Powers shows that young Sam was
fascinated by the spoken word (whether of preachers or slaves) and
by books, from the Bible (despite his famous heresy) to Cooper,
because his reality was so painful. The biographer notes an inner
conflict that is the key to Clemens's appeal: "the Connecticut
literary gent contending with the western roughneck." After
adolescence, itching to light out for the territories, young
Clemens "made the break from his landlocked life" and talked
himself to the captain's wheel on riverboats. Powers feels the Mark
Twain pseudonym helped free Clemens to become the age's most
celebrated humorist, traveler, lecturer and novelist. There are 20
pages of chapter notes, but this biography is too good to be
confused with literary criticism. Powers calls out "mark twain" and
leads us on Samuel Clemens's dangerous, poignant, and delightful
voyage against the current. (Kirkus Reviews)
While Mark Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American
writers, the actual boyhood experiences that fueled his most
enduring literature remained largely unexplored--until now. Twain's
early years were a decidedly un-innocent time, marked by deaths of
friends and family and his father's bankruptcy. Twain dealt with
those personal tragedies through humor and the tall tale. From the
time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out on his own and
boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first encounter with a
traveling "mesmerizer" (which ignited his lifelong penchant for
acting and spectacle), from the brooding sense of guilt and fear of
eternal damnation inculcated into him at church to the
superstitions and stories of witchcraft he learned from the blacks
on his farm, Powers unforgettably shows how Mark Twain was shaped
by the distinctly American landscape, culture, and people of
Hannibal, Missouri. Jay Parini, the celebrated biographer of Robert
Frost, called "Dangerous Water" "a long-needed evocation of the
boyhood of the man who invented boyhood for all time. . . . An
immensely shrewd and deeply engaging book, a great gift to all of
us who love Twain."
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