Description: Part of the Lives and Legacies series, this volume is a marvelous, compact introduction to the life and legacy of Mark Twain.
Review Quotes: "Packed with original observations about the most written-about American writer."--Library Journal (starred review)
"Powerful.... Ziff is adept at explaining his subject in terms of his cultural background."--Carl Rollyson, New York Sun"Larzer Ziff has a critical method, the one recommended by T.S. Eliot, that of being very intelligent. He employs it again in his new book, a 'brief life' of Mark Twain. It is a web of perceptions, constructed with notable verve; no self-indulgence, no fuss, one act of cognition leading firmly but not aggressively to the next. There is enough detail to keep the story moving along and the critical assessments at every moment justified. A continuously vivid book, unfailingly just to its complex subject. Splendidly written, as one has many reasons to expect of its author. A sentence by Ziff is worth more than a paragraph by most other scholar-critics. 'Tom Sawyer is a memory; Huckleberry Finn a recognition.' That's worth making a note of, and is typical of Ziff's command, a style without waste." --Denis Donoghue, University Professor and Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University"Impossible to put down--and the best single introduction to the complex force that was Samuel Clemens--Larzer Ziff's Mark Twain is a tour de force of insight, wit, and brevity: an illumination, and a pleasure, from start to finish."--Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life