Dangerous Water: A Biography Of The Boy Who Became Mark Twain: a biography of the boy who became Mark Twain

The Story

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Ron Powers comes a refreshingly imaginative recreation of Samuel Clemens boyhood years in Hannibal and how he drew on these years for the rest of his life as he wrote under the now-iconic name of Mark Twain. Mark Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American writers, yet few authors have examined, let alone understood, the well-spring from which Twains novels stem. Dangerous Waters is the first significant book on the early life of Mark Twain. As Powers writes in Dangerous Waters, Twains early years were a decidedly uninnocent time, marked by numerous deaths and his fathers bankruptcy. Twain dealt with those personal tragedies in a typically American manner: through humor and the tall tale. From the time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out for the territory and boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first encounter with a traveling 'mesmerizer,' (from whom he gained a penchant for acting and for 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, Mark Twain was shaped by the distinctly American landscape, culture, and people of Hannibal, Missouri. As he has so ably demonstrated in his previous books, White Town Drowsing and Far From Home, Ron Powers is one of our premier chroniclers of small town American life. A native of Hannibal himself, he is uniquely qualified to write of that now-vanished worlds effect on the boy who would become Mark Twain; a world whose 'dangerous waters' of experience Mark Twain learned to navigate, turning trials into those humorous stories that have so powerfully influenced American literature.