Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend - Ron Chernow

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Writer and journalist Ron Chernow feels very warmly about anyone who has won the Mark Twain Award for American Humor, including our friend Conan. Ron sits down with Conan for a deep dive into the life of Mark Twain, touching on Twain’s mercurial personality, his affinity for oddball inventions, the unique relationship he shared with his wife, his obsession with Shakespeare’s true authorship, and much more. Check out Mark Twain by Ron Chernow here. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com.Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: [phone]. Get access to all the podcasts you love, music channels and radio shows with the SiriusXM App! Get 3 months free using this show link: https://siriusxm.com/conan.

Hello, my name is Ron Chernow. And I feel very, very warmly about anyone who has won the Mark Twain Award for American humor. Oh, wow. Including our friend Conan O'Brien. So it's a delight to be here. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walk and lose, Hello and welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. This is kind of a special episode. You probably know I'm a huge history buff and I have read every single book that this gentleman has written, I believe. If he has another book out there, he might have written a Nancy Drew mystery that I'm unaware of. But other than that, I think I have read all of his books. His latest is a joy.

My guest, of course, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. And his latest biography, Mark Twain, is out now. And Twain, in my opinion, is more relevant at this moment than ever before. And we need Twain. And I'm just thrilled that this gentleman is here today and that he's written this magnificent book. ["The New York Times"]

Ron Chernow, welcome. I saw in your resume, Conan, that you had studied history at Harvard and I had studied literature at Yale. So you were in training for my career and I was in training for your career. I know, I know. So all this history that I've done.

You wanna trade? You wanna trade? Sure. You've done, you know, I've noticed something which is there's a, and other people have pointed it out as well, that you have written this string of spectacular biographies, and I congratulate you on the Mark Twain.

I read all, I believe 1200 pages of this book and was enthralled. I love it. And I learned so much about Twain that I didn't know because you've unearthed some amazing stuff about the man and to see his life, I mean, it's very hard to contain this guy's life. And I think you have managed to do that brilliantly.

But I was looking at your work because I believe I have read all of your books, which I can't say to many people, Judy Blume. But it's you and Judy Blume. But there's an interesting path to the order in which you wrote because you start out and you write about J.P. Morgan and great Gilded Age industrialist, which then got you interested and whet your appetite for your next book, which is Rockefeller, which then got you interested in finance.

And you think, I'll go back to the beginning, the the source who's running finance in America at the very beat will Hamilton you write that book and I know your plan all along was for it to be a musical with a lot of rap Yeah, people know people always say to me at events mr. Chernow did you imagine as you were writing the book that it was going to end up as a hip hop musical and I always say, I think the question answers itself. Yes.

There is a real, I'm sure you've seen it, but there's an amazing tape of Lin-Manuel Miranda. He's been invited to the White House to perform his latest work. This is obviously a bunch of years ago, 15 years ago or so. He's invited to the White House, to the Obama White House to perform his latest work.

And he gets up to the microphone and he says, I'm now gonna perform, this is the, you know, President Obama and the First Lady there and all these assembled people at the White House. And he says, I'm gonna perform my latest work. It's a musical about Alexander Hamilton. Huge laugh, huge laugh. And he goes, hold on, hold on, hold on.

No, no, no, I'm serious. It sounded so absurd to people. And then of course it became one of the most. No, in fact, you know, with that song a few months earlier, he had come to my brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and he sat on my couch and he started snapping his fingers and he did the opening number of the song. And when he finished, he said, what do you think?

I said, well, you've taken the first 40 pages of my book and you've condensed it into a four-minute song. And I said, that's rather amazing. But what I was thinking and I didn't say to him, I said, this is kind of embarrassing that it took me 40 pages to say. But this guy has done it in four minutes. And then a few months later, he said, go on YouTube, I performed it at the White House.

So there he is, not only performing it at the White House, but he got a standing ovation from Barack and Michelle Obama. And I thought to myself, I'm really strapped to a rocket with this guy. He's written one song in the show and he's already performed at the White House and gotten a standing ovation from the President and First Lady.

I loved when I went to see the play on Broadway and it's the initial run, I went into and it's the hottest ticket in town and I go to see it and I walk into the lobby and prominently displayed is your biography, Hamilton by Ron Chernow is right there. And it's like, you know, it's so, it's what any historian would dream of. Do you know what I mean?

That, and I know you would are disappointed that your book on Grant did not become a hip hop musical. But Hamilton leads to Washington, Washington leads to Grant. And I mentioned this to you out in the hallway. I love the Grant biography because the most shocking thing to me that I had never appreciated before about Grant

and I thought I knew about these guys. He goes to West Point, he fights in Mexico, he's in the Mexican-American War, and he tries his hand at business, and it's really not going well for him. And the Civil War is approaching, but as the Civil War is almost upon us, he is carrying and delivering firewood,

like chopping it and delivering it to people in the cold to make enough money to put food on his family's table. And then he decides to go sign up for the war and the period of time between him chopping wood Then he decides to go sign up for the war. And the period of time between him chopping wood and carrying it around to people's homes door to door and him being the most celebrated general in the biggest war in the history of the world is about two years.

No, it's the most improbable story. It's insane. Yeah, and you know. And then two years later, he's next to Lincoln, he's the most famous man in America. Absolutely, you know, one of the things that attracted me to the grand story was that I felt that all the people that I had written about up until that point

were kind of built for success. I mean, you know, you read about the early years of Alexander Hamilton, he has a focus, a discipline, a drive, intelligence, you know, if he didn't do what, you know, he ended up doing, he would have succeeded at something. Washington, a very impressive guy, even had the Revolutionary War not come along,

he's still a very impressive, capable. Yeah, and even John D. Rockefeller, when he's a young clerk on the Cleveland docks, he said, I was after something big. Whereas, you know, 50 hundred pages into Ulysses S. Grant, you figure, this guy's gonna end up a footnote in history at best. And so I was attracted to the idea

of writing about failure. I had written about so much success, and after all this, we all know life is much more about failure for most of us than success. And so, you know, than success. And so, you know, with Grant, suddenly the Civil War comes along.

He had West Point, he'd been in the Mexican War. He stood out all this military lore in his head, but he's working in his father's leather goods store in Galeen, Illinois, where he's working as a clerk junior to his two younger brothers. You can imagine how that felt. The war breaks out. There's a tremendous shortage, particularly in the North, of, you know,

trained officers. And he suddenly meshes with his historical moment, you know? And then he rises and rises and rises. But he's almost 40 at that point. He could easily have ended up living a life of total, you know, obscurity instead. And I think this is one of the things that inspired a lot of total obscurity instead. And I think this is one of the things that inspired a lot of people reading this story.

We all feel that we have something special inside of us if only the right set of circumstances happens. And Grant is kind of the greatest example of that. He is. If you saw it in a movie, you'd say, well, we gotta fix that part. Cause there's, I mean, the fact that you have him chopping wood and delivering it door to door

and maybe getting a nickel for his trouble and him saying, thank you, thank you very much and moving on to the next house. And then he's a celebrated war hero two years later in the most consequential, you know, war of that century, if I can say that. It's astounding. It's absolutely astounding.

Today we're here to talk about Mark Twain. You've written, I've been waiting for this book because I've made my life in humor, for better or worse, and Twain is the American humorist, and he comes from this era that fascinates me. And I was saying this to someone the other day, Twain has been turned into kind of an emoji, you know, the white suit, the cigar, the aphorisms that we see all over the place

on coffee mugs and everything, and kind of a lovable, you know, I mean, yeah, emoji for lack of a better word. And this book shows you that his life is, I mean, it's an epic life. It's uniquely American life. He does so much and he travels such a far distance. I don't mean he does it, you know, obviously in miles,

he circumnavigates the globe, but I mean, just from what he started as and what he became is infinite and it's all in one lifetime. And then he has so many contrasts and I wanted to talk about some of those. He's born in the South and he identifies as he is a Southerner. He is a Southerner and he has as a young, as a kid and as a young man, he has all of the antebellum Southern beliefs. Yeah, I mean, he's born into a slave-holding family

in a slave-owning town in a slave-owning state. Okay, he's born in Hannibal, which is tucked all the way up in the northeast corner of Missouri. It's right on the Mississippi River. So it's, you know, then and now rather isolated rural area. Except here is this broad-shining, magnificent waterway that's kind of bringing once or twice a day, you know, the world through Hannibal, you know, and pouring off those steamboats might

be circus players, it might be traveling salesmen, it might be a minstrel show, whatever. He sees the whole world passing through him and it kind of begins to give him an intimation of a wider world. But you're right, I mean, going through his letters, you know, when he's a teenager, not only statements kind of crude and racist about, you know, blacks, but Chinese, I mean, you name it. And this man grows an inconceivable amount

in the course of his life, you know, from growing up in this small town, backwater, and he has all the prejudices, you know, of the general environment. And he becomes so much more enlightened and tolerant of figure. I tried to touch on this in the, you get to give quick remarks at the Twain Prize, and I tried to touch on this, which is by the end of his life, his views have evolved so much.

And he is living in this age of imperialism. He's living this age when Americans are getting really excited about, you know, we're gonna pretty much control the Caribbean. We're gonna take over the Philippines. We're gonna take the sandwich islands. We're gonna take Hawaii. We're gonna expand.

And Twain is saying, I don't like this. And it's we're gonna take Hawaii, we're gonna expand and Twain is saying I don't like this and it's very unpopular and he's very much against all the 19th century racism towards Chinese. He's very progressive, he has a lot of views that are completely evolved from how he grew up. Yeah you know it's interesting because he fairly early on becomes America's most popular and beloved humorist. And he recognizes that it's something of a trap. He's always afraid of kind of alienating his readers, particularly alienating his southern readers,

because he had very, very strong, you know, views on not just politics, religion, and a lot of other things. But as his life goes on, I really feel by the end of his life, he's become the conscience of American society, you know, that he's dared to articulate all of those things that he was afraid to say. And I think that part of his power is he says things that all of us are thinking but won't say out loud.

And you mentioned, you know, his views on imperialism because the beginning of the Spanish-American War, he's actually very much on the beginning of the Spanish-American War, he's actually very much on the side of the U.S. He feels that we're defending these Cuban rebels against their Spanish overlords and we take over the Philippines. And he again, idealistically imagines that we're going to liberate rather than subjugate the Philippine people. And he gets up at a dinner in New York.

He was very often the toast master. He was kind of the perfect person to host a banquet. And he gets up there and he says that our soldiers in the Philippines are marching with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. Well, we all know, because we've all lived through wars. We know how difficult it is to criticize your own government in your own country. During a war.

During a war, yeah. And people in the audience gasped, and in fact another, you know, one of the organizers of this event immediately rushed up to the podium and said, no, our soldiers are not, you know, marching with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. And, you know, increasingly as he goes on,

he's willing to take the heat, he's willing to make the enemies. He's willing to make the enemies. And one of the interesting things, one of many interesting things about doing this book is we all like to think as people get older, they become more mellow in their views. Twain becomes more rabid in his rage and he's not only taking on America and the Philippines, he's writing pamphlets against the Russian Tsar, he's writing pamphlets against King Leopold II of Belgium for his behavior in the Congo Free State.

He's campaigning against municipal corruption in New York. He's writing pamphlets defending the Jews. He's speaking out in favor of women's suffrage, et cetera, et cetera. There's also his, was it called, he wrote an article or pamphlet in the United States of Lynchdom, was it? Yes, it was. And he was taking on topics, no one wanted to talk about lynching

in the Jim Crow South, and he would talk about it. Yeah, that was actually, you know, on so many things he became outspoken. That was one where he finally drew back because originally he was collecting a lot of clippings about lynchings in the United States, including in his own town of Hannibal. And he had originally planned and proposed to his publisher that he was going to do a history of lynching in the United States. He ends up writing an essay of The United States of Lynching,

which unfortunately did not get published during his lifetime. It was published 13 years after he died. And, you know, what he writes is that he tries to analyze the psychology of lynch mobs. And he says that it's really just kind of a few sadistic individuals who are instigating the crowd. And he says that most of the people are cowards who are coerced into it. I don't know if that's true.

I say in the book actually when you look at photos of a lot of lynchings, it seems like there are a lot of smiling faces, you know, of whites in the crowd. That turned out to, that was kind of one topic that was a bridge, you know, too far for him to do. But I do think he was prefaced, I mean, he was looking ahead to, I think he'd be aghast at the collective thinking of the news media now, the internet, how people love to group think. Group think is, I mean, he's talking about all these things.

There are so many places where he's talking about group think. He actually has a very interesting essay called Corn Pwn Ideas. And what he says, and I keep thinking about this with our own contemporary politics, that we have two sets of ideas. We have our secret and sincere positions on things. And then we have the positions that we take publicly for the sake of our own safety. You know, that the, he said that kind of life

makes cowards of us all, the need to support our families. We're afraid to voice things. He also felt that, you know, politically, we all like to imagine that we're voicing original ideas, when in fact you said, you know, 99% of the time, we are voicing ideas that we picked up from party leaders, from party organs, that we're kind of parroting things. Well, now we have that.

We have that, I mean, we have that over and over and over again now with everyone spouts what they, what they just heard on either CNN or Fox or that they saw on the internet and it becomes their opinion. Twain is talking about so many things that relate to today. And there's a couple of things that absolutely fascinated me about this guy

is that you use the words to describe him, glandular and volcanic. There's something driving this guy from an early age that you could almost think would show up on a CAT scan. Yeah, it's like, oh, I see. There was a growth pressing on the occipital lobe. There's something going on with this guy that yields him greatness and also terrible folly. He is obsessive, he is nonstop.

I've never read about an author who churned out so much. I mean, when he got writing, he would say, I mean, he would just sometimes standing up, sometimes writing at the billiards table, sometimes in his little octagonal writing room, you know, he'd churn out, you know, chapter after chapter after chapter, and go on these streaks of writing that he,

when he turns it on, when it hits him, he's doing that till the end of his life. I mean, he's so prolific to an almost crazy degree. That would be enough, but he's also, he's traveling as pretty much the world's first standup, not the world's first, but a standup comic as we would know it today. He's a very much in demand speaker.

He's traveling everywhere. He's also getting into insane moneymaking schemes. Mark Twain, he has an idea for like a board game. It's the Mark Twain memory game. He has ideas for a book that self-paces for when you put in clippings, all of them bomb. And the sad thing is he really gets involved in this printing press, this settable type press

that he thinks the page press that he thinks is gonna revolutionize the world and ruins not only his fortune but his wife's inherited fortune. They lose everything on this idea and he can't let it go like a gambler in Vegas. And so he is so good at seeing the flaws in other people. He's so good at seeing the vanity in other people.

And then he goes off and does the stupidest things good at seeing the flaws in other people. He's so good at seeing the vanity in other people. And then he goes off and does the stupidest things you can imagine. Like again, you just think he's driven. He can't stop himself in good ways and in bad ways. ["The Good and the Bad"] He writes a letter at one point to his family. He says, I have to move, move, move, exclamation point. And there is something driving him.

I mean, one of many contradictions of Mark Twain is he always described himself as lazy. But you know, we know Tom and Huck in the Mississippi, he published two dozen books in his lifetime, somewhere between one and two thousand magazine articles, filled up 50 notebooks, gave thousands of interviews, gave thousands of speeches, and I of course had to go through all of this. And so, and he was very aware of his own nature. He said, my emotions veer from one extreme to another.

Yeah. Kimia, would you suspect, I mean, today, today someone would say, you need to go see a psychopharm, psychopharmacologist. I mean, most great men in history would probably be told, you need to be on Prozac. Yeah. We, maybe let's put a little lithium in your coffee.

Let's do something. Yeah, and I mean, it was interesting because there were a lot of characteristics. He claimed that he was lazy, but then he would go through kind of this hyper-focused period. He could be very scattered and disorganized, particularly before he met his wife, who really cleaned up his ass.

Heavy, yeah. You know, people would walk into his room and there would be scraps of writing everywhere. There'd be pipes and cigars everywhere. It would be a complete mess. I did describe this to a psychiatrist friend who immediately said, you know, about attention deficit disorder. I try not to use contemporary psychological language. It seems inappropriate to project that back into the past.

But there's something like that that's clearly going on. But I got very fascinated by the business investments. In fact, at one point in the book, I said it was sometimes hard to tell whether Mark Twain was a literary man with business sidelines or a businessman with literary sidelines that he said, I have to speculate, such being my nature, he admits late in his life after he's lost

several fortunes, he said, I was always the easy prey of the cheap adventurer. And there was something very, very compulsive about the speculation because the tragedy of the story is, you know, here is a man who made a fortune in book royalties. He made a fortune in lecture fees. He marries an heiress from upstate New York. To a coal fortune. To coal and rail and timber. They're living in a 25-room mansion in Hartford with six servants.

in a 25 room mansion in Hartford with six servants. He blows his own fortune. He blows Livy's inheritance. They're forced into exile to economize in Europe for nine years. Because it's cheaper to live in Europe. Cheaper to live in Europe, but still, you know, they're living like in a, you know, 28 room villa in Florence to quote unquote economize.

Yeah. You know, they're living in a- There's no Airbnb. There's no Airbnb. And shout out to Airbnb, by the way. You guys do a great job. Sponsor. You know, then they're living in a very lavish suite

of hotel rooms in Vienna. In fact, they go on one trip to Europe and they buy so many objects to beautify their house in Hartford that they come back with like, you know, 12 crates and 25 boxes of things that they were like the original consumers. And Livy was usually the restraining force on Twain's worst excesses, but she herself was the original, you the original shopper. And she wrote a very beautiful letter to her mother at one point and said,

it's terrible how attached we become to material things. So here was a man, a couple who should have had a lovely placid life, that everything in the world, he had talent, he was making enormous amount of money, he'd married into enormous amount of- He's probably the most famous person in America. Most famous, and actually the most famous American in the world. In the world, yeah.

Yeah, but particularly in the United States, he was so fascinated that if he walked into a restaurant and theater, everyone would stand up and applaud. He was that famous. Well, it happens. When does it happen? What's that? When does it happen?

Sona calls ahead. Okay, I see that. I see that. And she says Conan's gonna be there soon. Yeah. And you know, you each get $25. Yeah. Hired actors.

Yeah. Lots of them. Yeah, lots of actors. But you know, it's all, you know, the problems are self-inflicted wounds. Oh, all of it is self-inflicted. Yeah. And he gets, there are these contradictions, which is, he's a Southerner who becomes obsessed with

living in the North, in Hartford, among all the most Northern liberal elites, the Tony, the Yankees, the writers. So he does that, he makes that transformation where he becomes the most Northern of Northerners. He hated, hated Gilded Age millionaires, desperately wanted to be one and did everything he could to be wealthy.

He had a publishing house, the type setting machine, these crazy board games, all of it fails. But he's this kind, generous, there's so many stories of his kindness, his generosity, his sweetness of nature. Yet when he decided to turn on you, he forget it. He was, his rage knew no bounds and the language that he used when he decided, I mean, these are people who you said, like, this is the greatest person I've ever met. This Matt Gorley is the greatest person I've ever met. I love Matt Gorley.

I love, you know, he's great. He's my best friend. I love him. He's fantastic. And then, and I've experienced this. One little, can we just end here? No, no, no. Just please.

You can, you can edit this for yourself. Clip that out. No, no, but then, whatever the friend did, that he decided was some kind of breach, or lapse, or any, he, that snake, that monster, that lower than low, and he would just, he couldn't contain himself, there was no gray area. There was no gray area. He couldn't, he couldn't contain himself. There was no gray area.

There was no gray area. He couldn't get out of his system. You know, when he was a young writer in San Francisco, he was about the same age as Bret Hart. Remember Bret Hart, the outcast of Poker Flask. Yep, yep. Who was the celebrity at the time. Who was the celebrity at the time

and who Mark Twain thought was the most celebrated and maybe the greatest, you know, writer of the time. They became very, very close friends. They later collaborated on a play, and Bret Hart was having many difficulties, came and lived in Mark Twain's house in Hartford. He said things about the house that Mark Twain didn't like. He said things about Livy, the wife that Twain didn't like.

And Mark Twain then turned on him. He would like fall in love with people. And then he would become severely disillusioned so that, you know, he finally says it, Bret Hart, he never had an idea that he came by honestly. Yeah. He said that he was a man without a country. No, that's too strong a term.

He was an invertebrate without a country. Oh, snap. Burn. And there was no one who was better at put downs than Mark Twain. But you know, Kurt, one of the things that I could not figure out about him, we all have these experiences with people where we're suddenly disillusioned with them and maybe tell them off. But when we do tell them off, it gets it out of our system and then we sort of calm down and we move on with our life. Mark Twain would not let it go. And if you can't let it go, the one who's gonna end up

being victimized by it is not the other person it's gonna be. It's you that's carrying it. It was kind of like this wound that he keeps probing again, again, again. I could not figure out, I don't know if any psychiatrist could figure out, I mean, he's late in life.

He's very disillusioned with the two most important people working for him, a man named Ralph Ashcroft and a woman named Isabelle Lyon, who was his private secretary. When he becomes disillusioned with him, he ends up writing a 400 page manuscript, you know, and he says about Isabelle who had been his. He is so close to her.

Yeah. And she becomes really important after he loses his wife. This is someone who cared for him, took care of him. And then he writes this 400 page. She was like the surrogate. This creed about how awful she is. A diss track. She was a brood, a simple heartless brood. She was like the surrogate's wife. Screed about how awful she is. A diss track. She was a brood, a simple heartless brood.

She was an insect. She was a reptile. He's like Kendrick Lamar back in the day. Yeah, well he also hated Drake. He also hated Drake. Which is your next biography is of Drake. Oh, he can rap your story. He can rap your story there.

You heard it here first, Ron Chernow's 1800 page biography of Drake is gonna drop in a year. But you know what's so funny is, if you ask people for the sort of the quick concept, what do you, Mark Twain, again, you think of the mustache, you think of this sweetness, sort of a slouch, grumpy, the cigar, but all these funny, funny cranky comments, and it can all seem, the cigar, but all these funny, cranky comments.

And it can all seem, you know, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, gliding down the river. And then you look at later in life, and there's so much tragedy. I mean, they lose this fortune. His one daughter, Jean has epilepsy. Epilepsy, yeah. And it's terrible. His one daughter, Jean, has epilepsy. Epilepsy, yeah.

And it's terrible. Suzy, when they've left the country, she's wandering around their mansion, which is shut down alone, and she has meningitis, and she pretty much dies almost alone. She's raving, yeah. While the family is in Europe. It's very tragic.

Twain's wife is very Europe. It's very tragic. He, Twain's wife is very sick. He's constantly beset by these money troubles, people suing him, trying to get the money back. And he does something that's really stunning. You know, today we live in this world where people declare bankruptcy. They'll give you one penny on the dollar, and then they start another business venture. Not naming names here, but plenty of people

who take advantage of this system. Mark Twain, it was very important to Mark Twain and his wife, Livy, that when they had to declare bankruptcy, this publishing house collapsed that they had created and they owed a lot of money, and they swore that they would pay everybody back every single penny. And then at an advanced age, he starts this world tour.

And I mean, I couldn't do a tour like this. I have tons of energy. I'm a lot healthier and younger. I could not do what he did. He goes at this time when it was difficult to travel, he goes everywhere in the world to raise the money to pay everybody back. And he didn't have to do that.

Yeah, and he's suffering terribly from carbuncles. I mean, he just, it was really grueling for him to do it, but particularly Livy felt that there was this terrible stigma attached to bankruptcy. You know, for her it was a real question of honor. Honor. Of honor, yeah. And in fact, you know, the eldest daughter, Susie, died at 24 of bacterial meningitis.

When they finally paid off the last of the debts, Livy writes that the happiest day that she'd had since her daughter died was the day that they paid off the last of the creditors. In fact, there's an interesting moment. Twain became very good friends with the standard-error mogul named Henry Rogers. And Rogers is kind of running rings around the creditors. He was a very, very shrewd Wall Street operator. He was helping Twain out. operator. He was helping Twain out yeah, he was helping Twain out and

Twain, you know in New York writes very proudly to Libby who was then in Paris describing the way that Rogers handled the creditors and Libby writes back she said I'm upset by the way we're handling the creditors. She really felt that they owed the creditors and they should be treating the creditors with much more dignity and respect. But it's an amazing story because it did take several years to pay off the debts. But you know what amazes me, Conan? Okay, so he goes through this terrible grueling, it was a 12 or 13 month around the world tour. And then they're living in Vienna

and he discovers that there is this, a patent for a new process for printing on carpets and textiles and tapestries. After everything he's been through. After everything he's been through. He hears about this new invention. He hears about this new invention. He goes to the American Consulate and he spends a day reading up on this industry. He's known nothing about this new invention. He goes to the American Consulate,

and he spends a day reading up on this industry. He's known nothing about this before. After 24 hours, he's convinced that he's the world's leading authority on this. And he writes a letter to his friend Henry Rogers, who is one of the main moguls of Standard Oil. And he suggests that they buy up the worldwide patents. The device was called the Raster.

He said, we should buy the worldwide patents for this. He said, people will call it a trust, this global monopoly they will have, but we mustn't mind that. You know, people will talk, but that's okay. And so he's gone from knowing nothing about this to suddenly imagining that he's going to be the head of a global monopoly. He wanted to be, you know, today we would call a billionaire.

He wanted to be a billionaire. He wanted to be a financial whiz, which is so crazy because it's what he loved to make fun of, but it's also what he loved to make fun of, but it's also what he wanted to be. And the second half of his life or actually the last couple of acts of his life, I mean, to me, he is so disillusioned and so dark.

And we think of Twain again, I keep coming back to this, that we think of him as this charming, the Twain you see on stage in one man shows is just this fun scamp and rascal and you know, the old riverboat pilot who's got his stories. In the end, he is so dark and he's questioning everything. Yeah, no, I mean, he says that anyone

who's not a pessimist is a damn fool. He actually says there was no life ever worth living. No life was worth living. It was worth living. And he was asked if he would like to live his life all over again. He said, I would like to relive my youth and then drown myself.

He made this statement that the only gift that God gave to the race was youth. He felt that everything else, you know, after that was bitterness and disappointment. And he's always kind of pining for this lost paradise of his youth, which is why he wrote so powerfully about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which of course has, you know, much darker tones to it. But it's a bit of a paradox because he had this adoring wife, he could not have had a better, you know, wife than Livy.

And she also, she read everything Twain wrote and would temper him. Maybe not, I mean, but she would remove, if she thought anything was a little, you know, oh, that's a little racier, that language is a little, you don't say breaches, you're talking about underwear, let's take that out. So she was very genteel. She was very genteel, which is a very funny,

they were an odd couple in that way, but she was a great partner. Yeah, and actually one of the interesting parts of the story is Twain said when they first met that he, Twain, was a mighty, coarse, rough customer. And she took this man, and she really, because he'd come from this little backwater town, she made him presentable in polite society.

And he really didn't know how to do it. She helped him with what we would today called anger management. He had terrible temper. So he would vary off. If he was angry, he would sit down and he would write a very, you know, impetuous, no telling somebody off.

And she trained him when he did that, not to send a letter, but to stash it in the drawer and wait a few days, and then when he would cool off. And I can't tell you how many letters there are, you know, in his archives, where the morning after a few days, and then when he would cool off. And I can't tell you how many letters there are in his archives, where the morning after a dinner party, he would write to someone who'd been at the dinner party. The madam tells me that I might have been

a little brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I really didn't intend to offend you. In fact, the daughters laughingly called this mother dusting father off. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it reached the point where they had this system of cards at a dinner table. So a red card flashed to Mark Twain meant, are you going to monopolize that woman sitting

on your right the whole time? A blue card meant, are you gonna sit back and not say anything the entire dinner? So she's kind of guiding him. These are soccer penalties. Yeah, these are soccer penalties. We have those cards for Conan to do in this conversation. Take it easy, Conan.

Wrap it up. But in fact, he said, he said, Livy edited my manuscripts and then she edited me. And she kind of really gave him a life and in many ways she was a long suffering wife. He loses her inheritance. We have extensive correspondence between them.

She never, never threw it in his face. He apologizes a lot. I mean, another word I wrote down after, when I was reading the book, I wrote down guilt. He has so much guilt. Today about, he convinces his brother to become a steamboat captain. He says, this is great, I love doing this.

And his brother's then killed in an explosion of a steamboat. And so Twain blames himself. Twain blames himself for so many things. When his daughter dies, he's not there. He's, you know, cause he's trying to raise money because he's lost all the money. So he blames himself for that.

And you just think of almost like Marley and Dickens. He's got these chains of guilt that he's got these chains of guilt that he's carrying around with him that go back to early childhood and somehow he's fighting against that. No, you're absolutely, I mean, the saddest one is that he and Libby, their first child was a boy

who was named Langdon, which was her maiden name. And Langdon died at 18 months. And what happened was that they were at the Langdon place in Elmire in New York. And one chilly morning in May, they went out driving, and Twain felt that he had not wrapped the baby up enough in this chilly weather. And they came back, and the baby had a cold.

But then the baby recovered and they went to Hartford. And after they went to Hartford, the baby died of diphtheria. Mark Twain told William Dean Howells, who was his closest illiterate friend, he said, I killed Langdon. He was convinced that that ride in the carriage. When it was emphatically not that. Emphatically not that case, yeah. In fact, his sister-in-law, Sucrane, afterwards said they left Elmire and went to Hartford because the baby was better. The baby

was fine. So he had this tendency to flagellate himself and take responsibility. And it was really kind of crazy what happened with Susie, the take responsibility. And it was really kind of crazy, you know, what happened with Susie, the eldest daughter, that he was not, you know, there at the time that had just come back from this round the world tour. There was no cure for meningitis at the time. You know, his being there would not really have helped matters, and in fact,

she was sort of delirious and raving. It's really, I mean, it's Shakespearean. She's one, he's built this massive house, which is, by the way, you can go see it. Yeah, it's still there. And it's absolutely beautiful. Kind of almost garish. It's like this insane,

someone said it looks like it's a steamboat. A cross between a steamboat and a cuckoo clock. Yeah, it's, but I mean, you would go crazy for it. It's the kind of thing you and I would tour and go crazy for it. And it's not a little, it's not unlike Theodore Roosevelt's house in Oyster Bay, this just big, long thing that people built back then,

massive, huge ceilings, lots of flourishes, lots of different colored stone and brick. But that was their joy. I think they lived there for 17 years. 17 years, that's right. And then they have to leave it because they can't afford to live there. They banish themselves to Europe.

And then of course, she's there at some point alone wandering around dying, going from room to room and and all the furniture is covered up with blankets, and you're just like, oh my God, this is, I mean, the sadness that he endures in the later part of his life, it's just like a boxer being hit over and over and over again. And then he-

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, because he's a novelist, and I think that he himself becomes a character perhaps greater than any of his creations. I think the life he lives is a story actually more dramatic than any that he created. And it's full of light and shadow because it's full of literary triumphs, to be sure,

full of personal calamities. And, you know, I haven't had a chance to tell you just how much I loved your speech that you gave for the Mark Twain Award, because I think that I was so glad just the tone of it, because Mark Twain was much more than just a humorist. He was a sage, he was a moralist, he was an activist.

He was a conscience of the person. I think that, you know, he was a moralist, he was an activist. He was a conscience of the person. I think that you really touched on that very, very exactly. But it's interesting, because we know Mark Twain as a humorist, and we had to think of him with the white suit and the cigar. But Mark Twain said a couple of things about life. He said, life is a tragedy with comedy distributed here and there only to heighten and magnify the pain by contrast.

Unbelievable. Yeah. And then he also said that life is a fever dream with sweetness embittered by sorrow and pleasure poisoned by pain. I know you're all going to go off and jump off a bridge after, you know, I'm telling you these comments that he made, you know. I mean, it's so funny, because you have this quote, and this, I underlined a few things in the book, because it's the later parts that really got to me.

At the end of his life, he's pretty much saying, I didn't do any of this. This was not, you know, you can't think of a more self-made man. There's Lincoln, there's Twain, there's a couple of like great self-made people who just comes from absolute, you know, nothing and is this force of nature.

And you think, well, he really made himself. And at the end of his life, he's saying, it was just impulses, urges. I just did things and now here I am and now my life's over and it all meant nothing. I mean, that's kind of his philosophy. You said this here, in his work, he thought he barely said what he knew to be true

but hadn't dared to voice, that the mind is a machine, that we mistake instinct for original thought, that the mind is a machine, that we mistake instinct for original thought, that free will is a farce, that our lives are predetermined by outside forces and that all acts are selfishly motivated. It's funny that struck a chord with me because the last couple of years I've had this thought that's just been rattling around my head where people have said, hey, you know, you've been around for a while and you've done some cool things. And I think, I didn't do any of it.

I don't know why the fuck, sorry for the language, but Sona does the writing. Oh. I've heard the language. I'm so fucking sorry. Well, please, Mr. Chernow, I apologize. Sona writes these things for me. Yeah, I'm sorry.

And I'm not gonna say this other stuff. Would you please substitute with breaches? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in my own opinion, I think I can't explain any of it. I just have had these crazy impulsive drives and impulses and maybe it is glandular. You know what I mean?

At the end of the day, what did I do? I don't know what I did, but, and certainly it's, and it's one one millionth of what Twain did, but it's, it's funny that at the end of his life, he won't take credit for anything and he thinks that we're all just in the void. He's very... Yeah, he has this kind of deterministic view that we're just kind of, you know, machines and they're stimuli and we react to it, that we're really not creating anything. The funny thing is, Conan, that someone reading that,

if it had not been written by Mark Twain, they would have said, well, what about Mark Twain? Mark Twain would have been the best example of the fact that there is true originality in the world. ["The New York Times"] He's obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare didn't write any of it, that it was all Francis Bacon. Yeah, he actually gets up after. And can't let it, can't let that go.

I know, he can't let it go. Yeah, and he gets up after he's watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet with a friend, and he gets up at the end and he says to the friend, that was the best thing Francis Bacon ever wrote. He was convinced that his discovery that Francis Bacon had written it said, it's the great discovery of the age. Also, I couldn't help but wonder

if it was a little bit of professional jealousy. Like, there's no way that guy did all that. Well, he loved the play, and I think what misled him is that, you know, as Mark Twain became famous, reporters were constantly flocking to Hannibal, Missouri and other places that he had lived. So, like, everyone who ever knew Mark Twain was interviewed 25 times. And he

couldn't figure out why there wasn't that same kind of trove of anecdotes and why weren't the people in Stratford telling all these stories about Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was doing all this, why weren't they writing, why aren't there the anecdotes about, there's so many anecdotes about me, there'd be that many anecdotes about Shakespeare. And you're like, well, no, no, it was a different time. It was a different media environment. His life was covered so extensively and with the kind of a handful of stories about Shakespeare. But if Shakespeare had lived in a different media environment, we would know everything

about him. But so, you know, Mark Twain wrongly extrapolated from it to Elizabethan times, but he actually wrote this book called The Shakespeare Dead that he thought was gonna set the world on fire. It didn't. He also thought that John Bunyan had not written Pilgrim's Progress. He thought John Milton was, but...

Maybe he didn't write his own works. He just projected it. This is his guilt. Yes, yes. It was all Livy, it was all his wife cranking it out. It was Livy, yes. It was Brett Hart. Yeah, Brett Hart did it all. Well, he was dead.

But I just, you know, it's funny, I think of if Twain were alive today, he'd be on the internet, he would be on the internet, he would be into every conspiracy, he'd be, and also, talk about a guy who you'd have to keep away from an infomercial. Any pop-up ad, anything, and Twain would be like, I've gotta have the abdominizer.

Why, that's the darn cuteness. That's the best invention ever. And Libby would be there saying, you bought 10,000 abdominizers? You know what I mean? I've gotta have those gels in my shoes. A sneaker you can just step into? I've gotta have it!

But I mean, you can just think. Shake weight, I've gotta have the shake weight. I've gotta have the shake weight. I gotta have the shake weight. I gotta gel like Magellan. I gotta gel like, I like the way that rolls off the tongue. But he would just be full prey to every, you know, the word would get around soon,

this is the guy, as it does, as, you know, as these programs start to know, oh, this sucker, you know, they're on to me. They know that I like a new kind of leather wallet that has like a little, they're on to me. So I'm just constantly bombarded with a new way to a little travel gizmo. I'm constantly being bombarded with those

because the algorithm figures it out. They would have figured out Twain. Well, I'm so curious if you were live today, if I can get to ask you a question. If I was alive today? That with Mark Twain, there was just no filter whatsoever. There was no kind of political correctness. He really felt as a sadist that everything was fair game.

So that, for instance, when he wrote his first book, which turned out to be his best-selling book, called The Innocents Abroad, he went with these tourists, kind of early tourist crews to Europe and the Holy Land, and he's just sounding off on all these things there in Italy, and he's making jokes about dwarves. He said, if you wanna see dwarves retail, go to Milan. If you wanna see dwarves wholesale, go to Genoa.

You know, all of these different things. Well, no one today would dare to make these sorts of jokes. And he really felt that the whole world was his field for humor. And I wonder how he would function today, you know, where we're much more sensitive about offending different groups. Well, I mean, I think it's a really interesting area because, as you know, you talk about it a lot in your book, Huck Finn is very controversial.

On one hand, Ernest Hemingway said, the American literature begins with Huck Finn. And many great writers have said that is the first great, great, truly great original American creative novel. And then, but it's got the N-word in it countless times. yet it also is exploring a real relationship between Jim and Huck and Jim is not a cardboard character. And so, but, and the N word is part of the dialect of that time, but for that reason, a lot of people say it should be banned,

it shouldn't be read or the word should be removed. And you think if he were alive today, he'd be canceled for things he did when he's 20 years old. I mean, in his personal correspondence, when he's writing about race, before he's evolved. And that, when I was reading that, I was thinking, we live in this era now where, you know, kids go online and do things, say things,

and they get tagged. Yeah. Like, you're the kid who said that, you're the kid that did this, you're the kid that sang that, you're the kid. And I don't know, you know, there wouldn't be a Mark Twain, he'd have, he'd have been, he couldn't exist in a world that's keeping a count where anyone can say, wait a minute, we just found something in your personal correspondence or in a speech

you gave when you were 25, you're canceled, you're done. Yeah, you know, Mark Twain is a type of writer almost inconceivable today. He had no inhibitions. He felt no need to have any inhibitions. Although he was puritanical about sex. Very puritanical about sex. Which I totally get. Yeah.

Ah. And it's only late in life that he starts to kind of, I mean, that's another thing you bring up in the book. And I don't know that we have the time to go into it, but it's a facet of his life. Late in life, he is hanging a facet of his life, late in life, he is hanging around a lot of young women. When I say young women, age is what?

10 to 16. 10 to 16. Ugh. And what's interesting about it is that there's no evidence that there was anything sexual about it. Right. No one, and he seemed, he was depressed, I'm not making excuses, because it was strange.

Everyone noticed it. Yeah. What did he call them? He called them his- His angelfish. His angelfish. Oh God. And so he's having, and to the point where his wife and his kids are saying,

they're trying to suppress any of the information. You know, if there's a write-up, he doesn't want the young kids around, but there is no evidence that it was anything other than him playing pool with them and liking to have them around because he loved the attention of, I mean, first of all, he was fascinated with childhood.

He loved having the attention of these young women who kind of adored him. Yeah. But it is kind of pathological. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of a good example. And who knows? I don't know.

It could have- Kind of the different straight things were perceived then and now, because he collects, and that was the term that he used, that he collected a dozen of these girls. He called them his angelfish. They became members of his aquarium club. They would come over with their mom,

or their dad, or their governess. He was very careful to incorporate the mothers, the grandmothers into this. There was nothing secretive. He actually flaunted it. Actually, one of the girls, Dorothy Quick, he met on the transatlantic liner. And when it docked in New York, there would always be

a scrum of reporters waiting for Mark Twain in New York. And he gets off the boat with this 11-year-old girl. And the next day, newspapers across the country, the headlines are, Mark Twain, captive of little girl, you know, and people found this, a very kind of charming and- Avuncular. Except, oh, Mark Twain, you know, he's written beautiful books about American children.

Of course he loves it. So far from being secretive about it, you know, he flaunted it. And in fact, I tell the story in the book that one of his friends, who was a famous actress, came to dinner one day dressed as a 12-year-old girl with kind of buttons and bows and everything because she wanted to be one of his angelfish.

So this is the way it was kind of handled. People were reacting in this kind of very jovial way to it. Whereas we look at this behavior now and it's you know very disturbing, you know odd and disquieting. He never acted on it. I mean it's very different. When I was doing research I read a book about you know Lewis Carroll. In the case of Lewis Carroll where superficially might seem similar, Lewis Carroll you know you know, collected nude photos and nude drawings of the girls.

You know, there was nothing like that with Twain. What the underlying dynamic was, I really don't know, but he had kind of enough control over himself. But he liked it. He would read aloud to them. They would play pool together. He did announce during his last three, four years of life, he said, I worked hard enough in my life, I just now want to play.

So it was like kind of a second childhood, but it's really strange and weird. I mean, I'm not here to defend it at all. It's really kind of very creepy. And I think that everyone who reads the book will have that reaction to it. But I also kind of have to describe in fairness to him, you know, what it was and what it wasn't.

That is one of the things that I really love about the book is you're like Twain, you're not afraid to go everywhere. You're not afraid to look at everything. You're clearly odd and impressed by this guy. You are also, you're exploring every nook and cranny. There are, he was fallible. When I keep saying he was, people like to think of him as this emoji, he was a great, I'm thinking of people

like Lyndon Johnson who embodied greatness, but their flaws are also great, which has been so well documented by Caro. No, you had a wonderful line in your Kennedy science speech that talked about the colossal mess of being human. That's what Twain is about. He was once asked how he knew so much about human nature because he traveled a lot. He had a lot of a lot of people.

He said, oh, no, no. I look into myself. He felt that every human being has all of nature inside himself or herself. And I think that that's true, that we can feel that we act on certain impulses, but we have inside of us almost every impulse. I think it's why you even watch a movie about some crime or something,

and we can sort of imagine one side of ourself can identify with it. We control that. We control this. So you want to kill and kill again. Are we getting this? I've been accused of a lot of things, not yet of being a serial killer, but somehow we've-

Hold on a second. I've got your travel records, some suspicious behavior. Well, the book is a delight. You've done it again, Mark Twain. He's just, I mean, the sign to me of a great biography is that there's no way to completely capture this guy, but I think this is gonna be the standard bearer. I think you're gonna, you need to read this book.

You need to read this book, because it's not just about Mark Twain, it's also about America. It's also about where we were then, and it's also somewhat about where we are now. So I congratulate you and huge thrill to have you on the podcast because I love this stuff. I really do. Oh, I feel like it's it's it's a privilege to to be with you and the whole group today

And I feel like you really have done honor to the book and to Mark Twain so thank you for reading it and reading it so closely and Attentively, it's really been a great experience. I guess we all win then Conan O'Brien needs a friend with Conan O'Brien, Sonam Avsesian and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gourley. Executive produced by Adam Sacks, Jeff Ross and Nick Leow. Theme song by The White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez

and Brendan Burns. Additional production support by Mars Melnik. Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Battista and Brit Kahn. You can rate and review this show on Apple podcasts and you might find your review read on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 669-587-2847 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. You can also get three free months of SiriusXM when you sign up at siriusxm.com slash Conan. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend wherever fine

podcasts are downloaded.