Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain

By Ron Powers and PAUL AND JONATHAN. WEISS

Book Overview

While Mark Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American writers, the actual boyhood experiences that fueled his most enduring literature remained largely unexplored--until now. Twain's early years were a decidedly un-innocent time, marked by deaths of friends and family and his father's bankruptcy. Twain dealt with those personal tragedies through humor and the tall tale. From the time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out on his own and boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first encounter with a traveling "mesmerizer" (which ignited his lifelong penchant for acting and spectacle), from the brooding sense of guilt and fear of eternal damnation inculcated into him at church to the superstitions and stories of witchcraft he learned from the blacks on his farm, Powers unforgettably shows how Mark Twain was shaped by the distinctly American landscape, culture, and people of Hannibal, Missouri. Jay Parini, the celebrated biographer of Robert Frost, called Dangerous Water "a long-needed evocation of the boyhood of the man who invented boyhood for all time. . . . An immensely shrewd and deeply engaging book, a great gift to all of us who love Twain."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306810867
• ISBN13: 9780306810862
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Before there was Mark Twain there was Sam Clemens

Most biographies on Sam Clemens deal with him as the writer Mark Twain, but as Hannibal native Ron Powers points out there was the boy Sam Clemens who lived in Hannibal, Missouri and that is where the stories came from. The town of Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi had an important impact on the making of the boy who would become a writer and it takes somebody who lived in Hannibal as a boy to understand the pull of the town and the river. Ron Powers paints a portrait of the boy, his family, the town, and the river and how he became the man the world knows. This biography will be an important part of the canon of Mark Twain as was the Justin Kaplan biography and all that followed.

A book that breathes life into a legend

I do not know of a writer who parses the American cultural landscape with as much intelligence and wisdom as Ron Powers. If you care about America's soul, and how it is faring as forces of modernity encroach upon it, you simply must become acquainted with Ron Powers's writing. This journey through the boyhood days of Sam Clemens is Powers at the height of his form.