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The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain
Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.
“Perhaps no other American author can boast such a richly documented record,” Ron Chernow writes in “ Mark Twain ” (Penguin Press), turning his distinguished attention to the subject in a mighty tome—some twelve hundred pages, with notes. “Due to prolonged exposure to slavery at the Quarleses’ farm,” he writes, “Twain had a fondness for Black people that didn’t stem from polite tolerance or enforced familiarity.” That’s a misreading of Southern racial dynamics, where intimacy and domination were bound together like strands of rope. Sam signed on, and between steering and spinning yarns with his fellow-rivermen he expanded his reading far beyond the boyhood canon of “Robin Hood,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “The Arabian Nights.” Now it was John Milton, Thomas Paine, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare.
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