Kevin J. Hayes's Mark Twain is the latest installment in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series – concise biographies of leading cultural modern figures that now cover almost one hundred painters, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, and political leaders, as well as writers. Hayes himself is no newcomer to the project, having authored two earlier volumes on Edgar Allan Poe (2009) and Herman Melville (2017). He has clearly mastered the form, delivering a succinct yet substantive overview of Twain's life and work.

While brevity can often entail generality or superficiality, Hayes avoids this pitfall, crafting a narrative that works both as an introduction to Twain for undergraduate students and as a synopsis that will appeal to more seasoned scholars of American literature. Throughout the volume he demonstrates impressive command of obscure early journalistic sketches like “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” (1852) and “The Launch of the Steamship Capital” (1865), as well as the author's voluminous correspondence and autobiographical dictations. He displays similar mastery regarding the enormous body of Twain scholarship, unobtrusively incorporating critical perspectives on canonical works like The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in a manner that neither bogs down nor adversely impacts the text's readability. The volume's footnotes contribute to that admirable balance, acknowledging the author's sources and pointing the way for further exploration should additional detail be desired.

Hayes's study, moreover, moves at a brisk, lively pace, charting Twain's dizzying peregrinations from the Mississippi river valley, western frontier, and Europe to the urban Northeast in seven compact, easily digestible chapters. Along with chronicling the outward facts of Clemens's life, he dispenses incisive insights into the author's characteristic style. Describing the arrival of the Quaker City tourists in the Azorean city of Fayal, for example, he quotes a sentence from The Innocents Abroad, “The people there pronounce it Fy-all, and put the accent on the first syllable,” then comments, “Twain's keys to pronunciation verify his keen ear, meticulous nature and crucial understanding of the relationship between language and place” (77). Hayes uses the same inductive logic to argue that the abrupt shift from “titillation to grotesquery” which characterizes Twain's 1866 description of a Hawaiian hula dance “demonstrate[s] another narrative strategy he would often employ, establishing one set of expectations and then undercutting it, giving readers something completely different from what he had led them to expect” (65).

Perhaps most memorably, he cites an excerpt from an 1876 letter to a young writer, advising her to seek out Thomas Fuller's 1662 History of the Worthies of England at a local library, and “Just read it – or part of it – not for the pleasure of reading it but for the pleasure of searching out what I call ‘pemmican sentences’ … Old Fuller boils an elaborate thought down & compresses it into a single crisp & meaty sentence” (91–92). Though Twain lauded the principle of literary economy, Hayes explains that the demands of nineteenth-century subscription publishing required padding his own “pemmican sentences” with long passages of expository prose in order to justify a volume's substantial purchase price:

Hayes's knowledge of literary history is evident in the anecdotes he weaves into his narrative to create a rich, three-dimensional portrait of Twain's far-reaching influence. Discussing the reception of Routledge's pirated 1867 edition of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, he explains that the volume proved extremely popular at so-called “penny readings” organized by community leaders in towns and villages throughout Great Britain. “These events, designed to elevate the working classes … got people out of the pubs, giving them an evening's entertainment for a penny” (72). Similarly, in his discussion of The Mississippi Pilot, an 1877 London reprint of Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of autobiographical reminiscences published a year earlier in the Atlantic, he offers this intriguing, little-known connection:

There is, however, one instance where Hayes's indulgence of his own personal interests diminishes the work's overall scope. His description of Clemens's 1884 purchase of an early bicycle and humorous attempts to learn to ride it – while interesting in terms of the writer's lifelong interest in technological innovations – is simply too protracted and digressive, covering the better part of five pages. Several footnotes, indicating that Hayes is the author of a 2015 book on cycling in the nineteenth century, reveal the passage's raison d’être. Given the space constraints of the Critical Lives series, this discourse on the bicycle necessitates slighting more important developments in Clemens's late career. Regarding Following the Equator (1897), Twain's chronicle of his 1895–96 world lecture tour to Australia, New Zealand, India, and South America, Hayes observes, but unfortunately does not analyze, a troubling conundrum: “Throughout the narrative … Twain celebrates English-speaking people around the globe. Paradoxically, [it] also manifests the anti-imperial rhetoric that would become a significant part of [his] polemical writings over the ensuing decade” (161). This thorny topic surely merits more analysis than the writer's humorous attempts to master a “high-wheeler.” Notwithstanding this caveat, Hayes's study is well worth reading, achieving a deft synthesis of biography and critical insight.