Title pretty much says it all. What do you recommend?
Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain is a classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It’s also 50 years old and the world has changed a lot since, so I don’t know how it holds up.
Have you read his autobiography?
Maybe you should start there?
I’m not sure that’s the best place to start. He dictated 2000 pages of random notes and stories before his death, with instructions to keep them unpublished for 100 years. It’s not a conventional chronological text. I’d guess you’d want to be pretty familiar with his life story before you get to his gloss on it.
I think there’s a lot of his life undocumented and a lot of misinformation/mythologizing piled on top afterwards, so trying to find the “scholarly” type of biography that’s careful to separate the two is probably more important than usual.
The Autobiography is not completely out of context. It may not be exactly chronological, but there is an Introduction, explanatory notes on everything he mentions, a detailed textual apparatus, plus, you know, it was written by Mark Twain.
I can tell you, if you have the pleasure of reading it, you will end up knowing more than a little about Mark Twain.
About 2000 pages more. Nobody needs that unless it is the cap on their Twain obsession.
The OP can follow any path to knowledge they like, of course. I’m just giving the information I would want to have. YMMV.
and I appreciate it…