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 In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of thought and research with a tour de force on the life of our culture’s founding father, re-creating the 19th century’s vital landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human being at their center. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived, breathed, and wrote — drawing heavily on the preserved viewpoints of the people who knew him best (especially the great William Dean Howells, his most admiring friend and literary co-conspirator), and on the annals of the American 19th century that he helped shape. Powers’s prose rivals Mark Twain’s own in its blend of humor, telling detail, and flights of lyricism. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has been able to draw on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. ~ The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

Now he found out a new thing–namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. ~ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things to get away from in the world. It transmits itself like physical form and feature. ~ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain