Mark Twain

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Mark Twain would be hopelessly out of favor with both wings of the modern duopoly.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

The disease afflicted the author as he was writing what would become "The Innocents Abroad."

Even Twain's own autobiography cannot reveal the whole truth of the literary legend.

In his later years, the famous writer surrounded himself with a bevy of adoring adolescents.

“I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” Twain said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

On Percival Everett’s “James.”

Percival Everett transforms Mark Twain’s classic 'Huckleberry Finn' into a tragedy.

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

What the author of "If—" learned about empire from the United States

It's probably further back than you think.

Debunking myths about the Pony Express.

Having inherited his mother’s beliefs, Reagan was ever faithful to the Disciples of Christ, whose tenets were often at odds with those of the GOP.

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book

Floyd’s unusual visibility gives rare insight into how the largely-invisible dragomen shaped travelers’ understandings of the Bible and the Holy Land.

There are better models for President Trump than William McKinley.