by Elka Worner
The marquee outside the Hermosa Beach Community Theatre read: Pages Presents An Evening with Ron Chernow. But inside, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer delivered far more than a reading of his latest book Mark Twain. What unfolded felt like stepping into Twain’s old lecture tours—full of laughs, clever insights, and plenty of charm.
The Pages bookstore event marked Chernow’s only Southern California appearance for his new biography, the culmination of six years of research and writing.
“As a biographer, one of the things I always look for is a combination of comedy and tragedy—and Mark Twain’s life really has it in abundance,” Chernow said.
Known for his sweeping portraits of American giants—figures he calls the “building blocks of American culture”—Chernow has brought to life the stories of Washington, Grant, and Rockefeller. His bestselling biography Alexander Hamilton inspired the hit Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which has been running for a decade.
Chernow doesn’t choose his subjects at random. He gravitates toward transformative historical figures—founding fathers, financiers, Civil War generals, and industrialists who helped shape the nation’s identity. The selection process, he said, is deliberate.
“It’s a lot like marriage,” he explained. “If you pick the right person, nothing can go wrong. If you pick the wrong person, nothing can go right.”
Chernow’s fascination with Twain began in 1975, when he was a young freelance writer in Philadelphia. A poster caught his eye: Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight! The one-man show—complete with white suit, mustache, and cigar—brought the Southern humorist to life with monologues laced with witticisms:
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class—except Congress.”
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
There was something fresh and funny about Twain’s observations and political barbs, Chernow said, as well as his plainspoken elegance.
Chernow’s own performance was a tribute to that night—and to Twain’s gift as a performer.
“Twain made his debut as a lecturer in 1866,” Chernow said. “He was jittery, but that slow drawl, the unruly hair, and the sly wit won over audiences immediately.”
Posters for Twain’s lectures often read, “Doors open at 7 p.m. The trouble begins at 8.” Later, Twain upped the mischief: “The orgies begin at 8” or “The insurrection begins at 8 p.m.”
With self-deprecating humor, Chernow admitted that Twain never believed a biography could truly capture a man. “It’s only the clothes and buttons,” the writer once said.
Chernow quipped to the crowd, “So, I guess you can all go home and toss my book in the trash.”
After a stint as a riverboat captain, Twain headed west and began writing for a Virginia City newspaper. With no journalism experience, he grew increasingly anxious as the deadline for his first article approached.
“He was relieved, he said, when a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more,” Chernow said.
Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad, which sold 100,000 copies, grew out of his travels through Europe and the Holy Land. He skewered not only the sights, but also his fellow American passengers.
“For Americans at the time, who tended to fawn over the superiority of European culture, Twain skewered almost everything he saw,” Chernow said. “He especially learned to loathe the Old Masters: ‘I’m glad they are dead. I only wish they had died sooner.’”
Twain could be charming and irresistible—a romantic who wrote 200 love letters to his wife, Libby. But he was also as mercurial as the Mississippi–moody, temperamental, often cruel. “My emotions veer from one extreme to another,” Twain confessed.
Libby, an heiress with refinement to spare, tried to smooth out her husband’s rough edges. At dinner parties, she used a system of color-coded cards to manage his social interactions: blue meant stop monopolizing the conversation; red meant speak up already.
“She edited his books,” Chernow said. “Then edited him.”
Haunted by the death of his father at age 11, Twain carried a lifelong fear of poverty. He became a compulsive speculator, sinking his lecture earnings—and Libby’s inheritance—into a typesetting machine and a doomed publishing company. He lost the equivalent of $6 million in today’s terms, but Libby never complained.
Twain, who grew up in a slave-owning household in Missouri, bore witness to horrors he didn’t question until adulthood.
“As a boy, he saw two ministers trading slave children and his father whip an enslaved boy the family had hired,” Chernow said. “He saw no reason to question the morality of this widespread institution.”
Chernow noted the irony that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “the greatest anti-slavery novel in the language,” has come to be associated with racism.
“Twain uses the N-word about 200 times—not to endorse racism but to expose the racism of Huck and the other white characters,” he explained. “Jim, the Black man fleeing slavery, is the most noble, dignified, and sensitive character in the novel.”
“In my biography, I spend an enormous amount of time showing the evolution of Mark Twain—from a crude and bigoted teenager in Hannibal to one of the most tolerant and broad-minded white authors of the late 19th century.”
Twain paid the tuition and living expenses of a Black law student at Yale, telling a friend, “We’ve ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs.”
Instead of mellowing with age, Twain became more outspoken. His satire spared no one, and his later writings evolved into blistering critiques of injustice, racism, religion, monarchy, and municipal corruption. He was an early supporter of women’s suffrage and condemned anti-Semitism at a time when both positions were far from popular.
“He never hesitated to protest injustice and began to function as the conscience of American society,” Chernow said. ER
