Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years Book

In Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years, Michael Shelden chronicles the energetic end of a life marked by vitality, wit and creation of a mountain of unequalled homegrown literature'including what many (including myself) believe to be the greatest American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Up until the end Twain continued to travel, write, snipe, and make mischief at the expense of the anointed.

Released in early 2010, the book follows three other Shelden literary biographies: on Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Orwell: The Authorized Biography, and which I enjoyed immensely some years ago.

In this biography we see Twain, now in his seventies, still rearranging his domestic affairs, building a new country home for himself and his daughters; we glimpse him donning his iconic white suit for the first time to lobby convincingly in Washington for new copyright laws; and we spend time with him in New York, London, Bermuda and other destinations, his curiosity, intellectuality and sharp sense of humor always engaged.

When his closest friend, Standard Oil magnate Henry H. (Hell Hound) Rogers, learned that, after protracted litigation, his company was fined a record $29 million for an illegal rebate scheme, Twain noted that it reminded him of the June bride's comment after her wedding night: "I expected it but didn't suppose it would be so big."

Now a widower, Twain was free of his beloved wife Livy's tempering influence on his work and his conduct'about which his two surviving daughters were worried and cautioning. But he was no fool and plotted to set off literary explosions from the grave, pouring his most iconoclastic and heretical thoughts into his autobiography and other works to be published only after his death.

While Shelden's meticulously researched and footnoted book deals necessarily with Twain's domestic travails (and they were ample, including a plot by trusted aides to rob him of his wealth and an attempt by actual burglars to do so while he slept), part of its interest lies in its portrait of American life a century ago. Twain interacted with Woodrow Wilson (then a mere academic), literary icon William Dean Howells, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (albeit contentiously, at a distance), and other political, literary and public players of the time. One is struck by how much the country'and the world'has changed over the past century, for better and worse.

More important for me, however, was the book's bringing me closer to my fellow Missourian, and sending me off to dig deeper into unread veins of Twain's vast literary treasure.