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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born on 30 November 1835 in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Twain freely adapted the incidents of his life and the stories he heard as a youth to embellish his fiction, as well as his travel writing and autobiography. However, this presents a problem to the modern biographer: in accounts of Twain´s life, how does one tell what is true and what is just a colourful yarn?
In this new account of a gifted, charismatic character, Kevin J. Hayes reviews Twain´s life, from his early journalism to his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, from the travelogue Life on the Mississippi to his final work, the sprawling, episodic Mark Twain´s Autobiography, and the public-speaking engagements that took him around the world. Synthesizing new information and sifting through the evidence, Mark Twain is a fresh, clear-sighted account of a crucial American writer.

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