The Boys' Life of Mark Twain

Every great writer is first a child with a hungry imagination. In this luminous biography, Albert Bigelow Paine traces the origins of Samuel Clemens - the boy who would become Mark Twain - through the fields and riverbanks of antebellum Missouri. Here is young Sam, sickly but relentless in his curiosity, listening as his mother and uncles spin tales around the fireplace, learning the rhythms of a slaveholding household he would later challenge in his greatest works. The Mississippi River flows through every page, its steamboats and Huck Finn adventures already taking shape in a boy's daydreams. Paine gives us neither saint nor monument but a real child: mischievous, book-hungry, marked by tragedy and reinvention. We see the seeds of Huckleberry Finn in a boy running wild along the riverbanks, the seeds of Tom Sawyer in his endless schemes. To understand Twain's genius is to understand the boy who made it, and no book does this better than this intimate portrait of an American original.