During his life, he was "the most conspicuous person on the planet, " as he put it, and his fame has not waned since. This book follows Twain's life and career from Hannibal to Hartford, along with side trips across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He led a spectacular and varied life -- on a riverboat in the Mississippi, as a newspaperman in San Francisco and Nevada, as America's most celebrated writer and lecturer, as a publisher, as a world traveller, as a bad investor who was frequently in dire financial straits. Books like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are part of the American rubric.

This book occupies a unique and indispensable place in the literature about Mark Twain: it weaves writing from his published works, diaries, and letters, illustrations and photographs, essays from modern writers (Russell Banks), scholars (John Boyer, Ron Powers, Jocelyn Chadwick), and actors (Hal Holbrook) into a compelling narrative of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's life.