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No less essential for any life is to capture the massive breadth of Twain's interests and travels. Not simply the bard of America's heartland, he was a worldly, cosmopolitan figure who spent eleven years abroad, crossing the Atlantic twenty-nine times. His mind was broadened by an around-the-world lecture tour as well as years of enforced exile in Europe. One of our great autodidacts, he had a far-reaching intelligence that led him to consume history and biography and devour tomes on subjects ranging from astronomy to geology to entomology. Our contemporary recollection of Mark Twain— mostly a sketchy memory of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi—doesn't begin to encompass the scope of his interests.

Beyond literature, Mark Twain engaged in an active business life, which was a constant, often damaging, distraction. He raged against plutocrats even as he strove to become one. "All through my life I have been the easy prey of the cheap adventurer," he confessed sheepishly.[15] A compulsive speculator and a soft touch for swindlers, he spent a lifetime chasing harebrained schemes and failed business ventures. His mind would seize upon an idea with an obsessive tenacity that made him oblivious to contrary arguments. Again and again, he succumbed to money-mad schemes he might have satirized in one of his novels. He embodied the speculative bent of the Gilded Age (which he named) with its fondness for new inventions, quick killings, and high-pressure salesmanship.

After his early days in Hannibal, Nevada, and California, Twain reinvented himself as a northeastern liberal, even, at times, a radical. Preoccupied with the notion that only the dead dare speak the truth, he thought our need to make a living turned us all into cowards. There were some large, controversial topics, such as Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan, that he shamefully ducked for the most part. Nevertheless, one is struck by the number of intrepid stands he took. He expressed quite radical views on religion, slavery, monarchy, aristocracy, and colonialism; supported women's suffrage; contested anti-Semitism; and waged war on municipal corruption in New York. A foe of jingoism, he also took up an array of global issues, including American imperialism in the Philippines, the despotism of czarist Russia, and the depredations of Belgium's King Leopold II in Africa. Indifferent to politics as a young man, he increasingly emerged as a gadfly and a reformer, acting as a conscience of American society. Even as his novelistic powers faded, his polemical powers only strengthened.

Twain proved fierce in his loves and loyalties. Perhaps his one source of unalloyed happiness came from his intimate relations with his adored wife and three daughters. The cynicism he reserved for others was offset by his implicit faith in Livy—the linchpin of his life—and his deep, if often more complicated, love for his three offspring, Susy, Clara, and Jean. His family life was shadowed by a staggering number of calamities. The saga of the Clemens clan, so full of joy and heartache, lies at the very core of this narrative.

If exemplary in marriage, Twain could be implacable in his hatreds and grudges. A man who thrived on outrage, he had a tendency to lash out at people, often deservedly, but sometimes gratuitously and excessively. He once admitted to his sister that he was a man of "a fractious disposition & difficult to get along with."[16] A master of the vendetta, he would store up potent insults and unload them in full upon those who had disappointed him. He could never quite let things go or drop a quarrel. With his volcanic emotions and titanic tirades, he constantly threatened lawsuits and fired off indignant letters, settling scores in a life riddled with self-inflicted wounds. Faced with his frequent inability to govern his temper, the gentle, loving Livy tried gamely to tamp down his fury. Mark Twain was often rescued by his wife—she was the necessary ballast of his life—and, consequently, could never quite regain his equilibrium once she was gone.

In our own heightened time of racial reckoning, Twain poses special challenges to biographers and readers alike. Though perhaps the greatest antislavery novel in the English language, Huck Finn has been banned from most American secondary schools, and its repetitive use of the N-word has cast a shadow over Twain's reputation. Born into a slave-owning family, he transcended his southern roots to a remarkable degree, shaking off most, but never all, of his boyhood racism. No other white American writer in the nineteenth century engaged so fully with the Black community or saw its culture as so central to our national experience. From boyhood, he treated Black people with notable warmth, affection, and sympathy. He experienced tremendous growth in his attitudes, graduating from the crude racist gibes of his early letters and notebooks to a friendship with Frederick Douglass, financing a Black law student at Yale, promoting the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and denouncing racial bigotry in a wide variety of forms. William Dean Howells termed him "the most desouthernized southerner I ever met. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery."[17] "Perhaps the brightest side of his whole intellectual career is his progress away from racism," one scholar has noted, and the statement is true despite some significant lapses.[18] From unpromising beginnings, Twain's striking evolution in matters of racial tolerance will be traced throughout this book.