The Ryen Russillo Podcast - ‘Mark Twain’ with Ron Chernow

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Russillo is joined by Ron Chernow to dive deep into his new book, ‘Mark Twain’. Plus, they discuss why Twain’s life made for an interesting story, his struggles throughout his life, and even touch on other historical figures like Alexander Hamilton. Check us out on YouTube for exclusive clips, livestreams, and more at https://www.youtube.com/@RyenRussilloPodcast. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Host: Ryen Russillo Guest: Ron Chernow Producers: Steve Ceruti, Kyle Crichton, Mike Wargon, and Jonathan Frias This episode is presented by State Farm®. Dishing the assists you need off the court. State Farm® with the Assist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ron Chernow is one of the great biographers in the history of biographers and he has covered history extensively. It is an interview that I've hoped to do for years. When we got word when the Mark Twain book was coming out that we'd be able to get him. It was something I was really looking forward to. So something that I was planning on doing and looking forward to for about a year. The Twain book is out. We discuss it. We also get into some of his other works, Hamilton, Washington, a little bit of Grant. There's some overlap on some of these characters as well. So I hope you enjoy it. I know I did.

So I hope you enjoy it. I know I did. This has been years in the making and I am thrilled, as excited as I've been in a long time for a guest. Author Ron Chernow joins us. Good to see you. Pure pleasure to be here. Thank you, Ryan. I just finished Twain.

I appreciate the work that you put into this one. I wait with great anticipation every time I know something new is coming through, so I rip through it. Let's start with something simple. Why Twain? Okay, you know, back in 1974, I was a struggling 25-year-old freelance magazine writer in Philadelphia. And one night, I saw posters up around town that said, Mark Twain tonight, exclamation point, a 90-minute show by Hal Holbrook. Now, Hal Holbrook, maybe forgotten figure for a lot of people, was an actor who did this one-man impersonation of Mark Twain.

So I went in there, he was standing up on the stage with the trademark white suit and the cigar and the unruly mustache. He told one political witticism with the trademark white suit and the cigar and the unruly mustache. And he told one political witticism after another that left me howling with laughter. He said, there's no Native American criminal class except for Congress. He said, suppose you're an idiot, and suppose you're a congressman but I repeat myself and then he said I say and I say it with pride that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any other in the world. Well I was just sort of howling with laughter because the lines were not only so fresh and funny

they still felt very pertinent and these were lines that had been written 100, 150 years ago. So this kind of started my Mark Twain obsession. It was almost more with Mark Twain, the platform artist and the political pundit, than just the Mark Twain of the novelist. And then about 20 years later, Ken Burns did a very good four-hour documentary series about Mark Twain.

The first half was kind of the familiar Mark Twain. It was the Mark Twain of Tom and Puck and life on the Mississippi. And it was all rather Joe, Bill, and Mary. Then the second half was about his later years that were really quite tragic. So at first you had this great literary triumph. And then you had tremendous personal know, tremendous personal complications.

He goes bankrupt, he's forced into exile, there are calamities in his family. So, you know, as a biographer, what I always look for is that kind of combination of light and shadow because we're all strange mixtures of good and evil. And I was amazed by just the many contradictions of this man and that the story was really much more complicated. You know, we have this image of this merry man with a twinkle in his eye telling funny stories and it was a lot more than that. Anyone that's able to be this creative as long as Twain was, which is one of my favorite kind of parts of the arc of his story is like, he was this significant for this long. Like, do you know how hard that is to pull that off?

What do you think was the most influential stage or experience or part of his life that led to having him this unique voice? Well, you know, he had a way, and some of this was just accidental. He had a way of always being where the action was where, you know, he had a way, and some of this was just accidental, he had a way of always being where the action was, where, you know, a vast swath of humanity crossed his path. For four years when he was in his twenties, he was a steamboat captain on the Mississippi, and you can imagine that every breed of humanity crossed his path. The Civil War breaks out, blocks commerce on the Mississippi, and then his brother had become the secretary for the Nevada territory.

And he brings along his kid brother, then Sam Clements, to act as his private secretary. And it was the time of the Comstock load in Nevada, which, for those who don't know about it, was the biggest silver mining boom in American history. So people all over the country are flocking to the Comstock. So again, gave Mark Twain the opportunity to see Americans from across the country, really people across the globe.

So he's always storing up experiences along the way. So he really has a vast range. You know, he once said, Ryan, in his notebook, I found this line, he said, I'm not an American, I am the American. Sounds kind of arrogant. But there's some truth to it. I mean, we think of him as the quintessential American, because he sort of embodies much of the best in our culture. You know, he has that irreverence, that cynicism, that skepticism of the rich and powerful. He has the sympathy for the underdog.

But he also has this money-mad side, and he's stumbling into one crazy business venture after another. So he really is our national character written large, which I think is why he continues to this day to fascinate us, we see ourselves in Mark Twain, even though he was a genius, but he was a genius kind of made up of many of the ordinary elements that we all have. It really emphasized the power of being observant. And I think some of the greatest voices in

whatever, you know, whether it's literature, I think, you know, obviously different forms of media now, but people that can combine these, these different life experiences, then also relay them to other people. Like that seemed to be the gift. It was, it was clear he was a genius in his first writing opportunities. It's always like, Hey, this guy's like pretty gift. It was clear he was a genius in his first writing opportunities. It's always like, hey, this guy's like pretty good. I mean, it's almost as if he's like the first Paul Thoreau. Like he's this incredible travel writer. Do you think that that ultimately was the most important thing in him creating this path where he becomes kind of the standard for American literature with a very different

non-traditional background. Yeah, you know, people tend to know Tom Sawyer and, and Huck Finn, but actually his best selling book, sold 100,000 copies, was his first book and it was called The Innocence Abroad. He went on this like early tourist cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. And he not only is satirizing all the different sites they see in Europe and the Holy Land, but he's satirizing his rather stodgy, pious fellow passengers as well. And what's so interesting about Ryan, it was a time when Americans tended to fawn over European culture.

And here is Mark Twain, who is a wildly irreverent about everything that he sees. You know, they're dragging him through one museum after another instead of being awed by paintings. He said that he loathes the old masters and he only wishes that they had died sooner. You know, they take him to the Sistine Chapel and he calls it Michelangelo's Nightmare. They take him to see Da Vinci's The Last Supper in Milan and he said that there were a dozen people who were doing copies of the painting of the mural and he said he couldn't help noticing that all the copies were superior to the original. And he said that there were many painters in Arkansas

who would not have had to pay the science for living if they had lived in the days of the old masters. Well, here's someone who is, I think, so fresh and funny because he's saying the sorts of things that many of us might think but are afraid to say out loud, embarrassing ourselves. And he's seeing everything with these kind of, you know, virgin eyes. I think what you said about being observant is very important.

Now, there was a famous line that Henry James said, you know, to be a great noticer of all things. And there was something about genius that manages to use every scrap of experience. But it's particularly funny just then when they get to the Holy Land, which people that are always written about in this kind of hushed, sound tone, they go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, of course, one of the most sacred sites in Christianity,

maybe the most sacred site. And Twain is wandering around in the church. And at the time, they thought that Adam's tomb was in the church. We no longer believe that. But there was this marker for Adam's tomb. And so Twain is wandering around the church. And he says, finally, I found the relatives, Adam.

And I dropped my knees and burst into tears. He was laughing. Again, I mean, who would dare to sort of be funny? It's a terror at that moment. And he always found enormous humor in Adam. In fact, he said that he always envied Adam because when Adam told the joke, he knew that no one had told him before.

He's a contradiction for a bunch of different examples that you point out in the pages. I enjoy him kind of liking his small town. If you ended up in Hannibal, you must have made a mistake type of upbringing, this rascal, this outsider. And yet he also really enjoyed the finer things in life, whether it's his choice in marriage, where he settles in Hartford. I would say he would give George Washington a run for buying on credit, remembering your book on him. But he seems to be like, I'm this every man, but I'm also sort of an elite socialist as well. Now it's interesting because he's born in this little town called Florida, Missouri, all the way up in the Northeast corner of Missouri, and had a town of 100. In fact, he said that when he was born, he increased the population of the town by 1%.

He said there's no record of anyone else doing so much, not even Shakespeare. And then when he's four, the family moves to Hannibal, which was 35 miles to the northeast, very significant, because it was right on the Mississippi River. Of course, that's going to change his life. But here's this poor boy. His father failed at one business after another. Fast forward to he meets Libby Langdon, who's this heiress from upstate New York.

Her father had made a fortune in coal and timber and railroads, twain himself against to make a fortune from book royalties and lecture fees. And between Livy's inheritance and Twain's royalties and fees, they buy a 25-room mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, 11,500 square feet with a loyal team of six servants. And so here's kind of one of the basic contradictions of his life, not only because he was so poor

and then he went to being so rich, but his first novel was entitled The Gilded Age. Actually it was Mark Twain who coined the term The Gilded Age. And in that book, in many of his other books, he's satirizing the plutocrats of his day. But in his private time, in his private life and investing life, he's doing everything in his power

to become a plutocrat himself. And he succeeds. And he's living as much money as they have. They were just incorrigible spendthrifts and always had this tremendous overhead, which put a lot of pressure on him as a writer. But he got from being this poor southern kid to being this sort of northern you know plutocrat living in a mansion in Hartford where they lived for 17 years until all of his

disastrous investments both in a newspaper typeting machine and also in a publishing house. Both of them ended up failing at the same time, you know, and driving him into exile, into bankruptcy and poverty. But the interesting thing, Brian, I thought about this entire time that I was writing the book, was that here was somebody, he made so much money, he married into so much money, that he could have had an easy placid life so that the wounds are all self-inflicted. He didn't need to engage.

He really functioned almost like a venture capitalist, even though he really didn't know very much about business. He began to finance the development of this newspaper typesetting machine. He was convinced that it was going to revolutionize the newspaper business worldwide. You can see in his notebook, he's jotting down the number of newspapers in the world that will be forced to buy the machine. And he says that he will become one of the richest people in the world, he said,

I'll become a member of the Vanderbilt gang. And so in contemporary dollars, he and Libby end up investing $6 million in this machine, which is crazy for a writer, writer's life, no matter even if more brain. Any writer's life, the income is so irregular and unpredictable. You're a best seller. One book, you're a bum.

The next, you just never know what will happen. And so he invested in that for 14 years. It was invented by a man named James W. Page. When he first meets Page, he says that Page is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention. He thought he was a complete genius. By the end, when this machine goes bust, he is so angry at Page. He said that if I saw Page with his testicles caught

in a steel trap, I would shut out all human sukkur and watch him till he died. Another time he said that if Page were drowning, he would throw him in an anvil. Well, this was something that he should never have gotten involved in. Again, as any venture capitalist, but no, the risk is kind of investment.

It's that sort of open-ended development because you never know how many years it's going to take to launch this product and launch this company. But he himself said, you know, ruthfully at the end of his life, he said, I've often been the easy prey of the cheap adventurer, cheap speculator, and boy, he was. Yeah, I felt bad for him for a bunch of different reasons throughout the book, especially in the second half. I can't imagine what it was like knowing the end game,

but reading his personal notes and the hope with each stage, because the investments and then doubling down on it and then just convincing himself and Paige would have him visit and the thing would fall apart and they'd be like, we just need by the end of the day and then it would be another few months and it would be another check. What was that like seeing his hope

slowly dwindle over the course? The same brilliant imagination that made him such a great writer, that was transferred to his business career. But what I found was that he had this very florid imagination for the potential success of the business that he was involved in, where he seemed to have a very impoverished imagination for what the failure might look like. So I mean, there was an interesting case

because he started his own publishing house. He was convinced that all publishers were kind of morons and swindlers. He decided that he would start his own publishing house. Did very, very well at first. Their first two books were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Personal Memoirssses S. Grant,

which was the biggest bestseller of the 19th century. So it starts out, it looks like indeed he is a business genius. But then he becomes a victim of his own imagination. He decides to sign up the authorized biography of the Pope. Now this has topical resonance because the Pope at that time was Leo XIII, the current Pope, just as now Leo XIV. And Leo XIII was very transformational about the Pope. But Mark Twain was absolutely convinced that every Catholic in the world would rush out

to read the authorized biography of the Pope. When the Pope himself was told about it with papal invalability, the Pope was skeptical that all these Catholics would want to read this book. Turned out the Pope was right and Mark Twain was wrong. But it was sort of an example that his mind would be working overtime on their success. In fact, with the page type setter,

he almost never seemed to stop and think about what failure might be. And it was actually his ancient mother, Jane Lampton Clemens out in Missouri, who posed him the simple question, what if the machine fails? And that was a question that he never seemed to ask him himself and he would get just very, very caught up.

He was very much a victim of his own imagination. But of course it's that great imagination that we owe all these great books and stories and all the tremendous, you know, witness systems. But it, in a business setting, it turned out to be his undoing. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. It's no secret that great teams need great teammates. And everything you do doesn't mean a doing. Get a game plan that helps fit your life and talk to State Farm today. State Farm with the Assist coverage options are selected by the customer availability and eligibility vary by state. You know, the sad parts of his story and certainly the deaths of family members, which goes without saying, but you can just see that very definitive like

timeline moment where they leave to Europe and end up just touring, but you can just see that very definitive like timeline moment where they leave to Europe and end up just touring. But it's essentially to kind of like get away from his financial woes, not to escape them because he ends up paying everybody back and people praise him, but they can't afford to continue to live this lifestyle in this Hartford mansion with all of the employees, they're trying to kind of keep up with the Joneses in a sense. It's just not the reality. So they're just kind of moving all over Europe. But as much as that is kind of like the end of the family dynamic and how much they pine for going back to Hartford, did that make him more popular that it was almost this decade-long

sabbatical from being available in America? Yes, it did. And I think that just surprised him. You know, I was saying before, Ryan, that in many ways he's the quintessential American. So people are always surprised to learn that there were these kind of nine years in exile. In total, he spent 11 years outside the United States. So this man that we think of as the quintessential American was actually the most, you know, worldly and well traveled and cosmopolitan person. When he and Libby and the three daughters went here,

it was to try to economize, which was something that was very difficult to do. So while they're economizing Europe, they're living in this 30-room building outside of Florence. They're living in a lavish hotel suite in Vienna. But when he comes back to America, he is surprised that his popularity has grown in his absence. He's more popular than ever.

In fact, he had to do kind of in the middle of that exile period. He does an around the world tour and people all over the United States and Canada, and then he goes to Australia, New Zealand, then to India, then to South Africa. He's amazing, everyone, that he has fans all over the world and that he's so beloved and that people come out to see him lecture because they knew the story of his bankruptcy and they're trying to help him out. In fact, there's an interesting moment, Livy, because she had this very aristocratic background for her when they went bankrupt, she felt this tremendous stigma of bankruptcy. She said, we must pay back the creditors every penny.

Well, they end up paying back the creditors a little bit ahead of schedule. And Mark Twain is reluctant to publicize that because he's getting all these lecture fees and selling all these books because people feel bad even that he's going bankrupt. So he doesn't want to announce too quickly that he is out of bankruptcy.

But you know, it's interesting that at the very end of his life, this picks up something he said at the beginning, when he died, the New York Times said that Mark Twain had become so integral to American life that it was very hard to imagine a time when he was not there. It still is actually difficult for us to imagine, you know, America without Mark Twain. But after the nine years of exile, when he comes back to New York, he's more beloved than ever. And it's also interesting, you know, he always had very, very strong opinions, unsurprisingly.

interesting, you know, he always had very, very strong opinions, not surprisingly, but he was, he'd start out, he was the beloved humorist, and so he was always afraid that if he expressed these strong opinions that he would alienate his loyal readers. Well, when he comes back to the United States, this is now about 1900, he's in his 60s, he suddenly is fearless and outspoken and saying all of these controversial things. In fact, you know, everyone knows about the white suit. He suddenly appears in the white suit. And when the reporter is asking him, why are you wearing this white suit? And he said, it's the uniform of the American Association of Purity and Perfection, which I'm president and so a member. But it was interesting that with the white suit, he used to call the white suit his

I don't give a damn suit you know but custom to thinking of people mellowing with age but it's the opposite he becomes more and more of a political activist more and more outspoken on different topics and he is embraced by the country and he's willing to say a lot of really very controversial things that he would never dared to have said earlier in his career. Whenever you're going back in history and you start thinking of like, okay,

we're digging through the memoirs, we're digging through their opinions on what are current events at that time, and then you're applying today's understanding of these same topics, it's where, you know, history I think at times can be a little unfair in how we judge some of these people. I mean, sometimes I think it's a complete waste of time to apply today's standards.

What's so fascinating about Twain is that he is so advanced on so many of these issues, whether it's race, all of his stuff, I'm going to say everything, because I don't know all of his thoughts or every single one of his written words, but women's rights, he's all over it. Religion, he's just fearlessly, to your point, pragmatic about it. It doesn't make a ton of sense for a thinker like him. And then it even gets to the point with imperialism

where once he travels the globe, he starts coming back. I mean, he is on fire, you're right. It's the complete opposite of aging gracefully. It's like, I actually have way more thoughts and it doesn't have anything to do with two fictional characters on a raft. Yeah, you know, in fact, you know, when he comes back after the Spanish-American War, the US occupied the Philippines and Twain had been a strong, was kind of

jingoistic support of the Spanish-American War. He thought it was a noble war and the righteous war, and he was very much in favor of it. He felt that it was these Cuban insurgents against their colonial Spanish overlords. And as part of that, we took over the Philippines. He felt that we had taken over the Philippines in order to create a Philippine,

he said, instead of redeeming the island, we subjugated it, we conquered it. It became a territory for us. He got up at a dinner in New York City. Everyone always wanted Mark Twain as the toastmaster at a banquet. He was perfect for that. So he gets up at this banquet where everyone is imagining he's going to say sort of delightful and funny things because he's Mark Twain.

Instead he starts talking about the Philippines. And he said that the American soldiers in the Philippines were fighting with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. Wow. That's, I mean, any, we've all been through wars. We know that you can criticize a war is always a very risky thing to do, and you risk a tremendous backlash. In fact, when he said this at this banquet,

someone immediately rushed up to the stage and said, our soldiers are not fighting with disgraced muskets, and they're not fighting under a polluted flag. It was very difficult to say that. He lost a lot of readers. I mean, you can see we have like 19,000 letters that were written to Mark Twain. You know, you can see the letters that people were writing to him. You know, Mr. Twain, I used to think that you were so funny and I loved all your

stories and I'm never going to read you again course, there were a lot of people who read with him. There are a lot of people who admired his courage in doing this, but suddenly everything that has been kind of stirring around inside Mark Twain starts coming at you. And you mentioned his views are always surprising in terms of women you know, women's suffrage. He said that there would never be a perfect civilization until there was an

exact equality between men and women. He said that the average woman has a higher intelligence than the average man. I won't comment on that. He also, you know, he had tremendous admiration for the Jews, we've had so much discussion recently of antisemitism and Mark Twain said that the Jews were the most marvelous race on the planet. He said they were the intellectual aristocracy, et cetera, et cetera. And he was one of the first people to speak out

in terms of the right of this case in France. And so you never quite know what his take is on something. And I think that part of the power, people very often ask me, you know, would Mark Twain have been a Republican or a Democrat? You know, then or now. And it's interesting because we're going through this period of hyper partisanship to warring camps. Well, that happened in his day.

And in fact, you know, he made the statement, he said that things had gotten so bad that if the Democrats included the multiplication table in their electoral platform, the Republicans would vote in town at the next election. So he became what was called a mugwump. He felt that people had become captive of party and that they just kind of repeated the slogans, you know, the positions of the party. And what the mugwumps represented was that they would not have that kind of party allegiance and that they would vote from people based really on the content of their character. And he talked about the fact that when he was a boy, in order to get you to vote for

someone, they would hand out donuts. And so he claimed that, I don't know if this was true or not, but he claimed that he was a boy, he was a member of the anti-donut party. So he was trying to create this anti-donut spirit. But isn't that interesting? Because we keep talking about Americans, you know, dividing into these tribal loyalties. But this happened before in our history. He tried to break away from that. And he had been a loyal Republican in 1984.

They nominated a man named James G. Blaine, who'd been Speaker of the House. He'd been a very corrupt Speaker of the House. And the Republican press itself had always been criticizing him. Suddenly, he's the presidential nominee, and he's no longer corrupt. He's perfect. He would be, you know, and they just whitewashed him.

And Twain was very, very disillusioned. And he said to all his friends in the party, said to all of these newspaper editors, he said, I thought he was such an awful person. Now you're talking about how wonderful he is. So we can all think of different analogies in contemporary politics too. And it's just an enormous amount in his life and his story

that still feels very, very fresh and relevant today. Yeah, I loved anytime he was talking about government because I would tell you, like he, and we've all heard the line, there's no good government, but his conclusion is there's no good government because of people, all right, and the failures of human nature, human instincts. Yeah. And, you know, I just wonder, is it, is it his level of education?

Is it back to the observations throughout his time? And then, you know, once it starts to turn for him, you know, he outlives his wife, he outlives three of his four children. Um, he's clearly suffering from some version of depression I would imagine. I don't know that that's debatable. And it becomes, and I wouldn't say it's a spiritual thing because of his lack of faith, right? He was not a religious person. I just felt really sad towards really sad towards the end of the book Ron, because it, it's this brilliant character that has this experience in life so few would ever have.

And yet it seems like towards the end of his life, he's coming to the conclusion that life is just a test that everyone will ultimately fail because of the nature of human beings. Yeah. It's again, one of kind of many contradictions and ironies of the story of this man who made us laugh more than anyone else. He just had so much sadness in his life and he said, and made a couple of statements later in his life, he said, life is not a comedy. Life is a tragedy sprinkled here and there with comedy, but only to heighten the pain and amplify it by contrast. Another time he said that life was a fever dream in which sweetness was embittered by sorrow

and pleasure was poisoned by pain. Those are kind of pretty grim statements. But in his own life, as you were saying, there were so many family members, you know, who had died at one point in the book. I make this statement, you know, that suddenly so many awful things happened in his own family. It's amazing he didn't commit suicide, you know, so you can see the bitterness and the pessimism coming from his own experience. And it is a sad thing because he was such a beloved figure who brought you right to so many people. You would have liked to have seen him have this happy old age. Instead, he's this kind of lonely man and he's raging,

and then his behavior becomes increasingly odd. Would he have liked this book? I think, I have to say that Mark Twain tended not to be generous in his attitude towards other authors. I can give you a long list of authors he hated, starting with Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot, et cetera, et cetera. All people who were widely read by his wife and three daughters,

but sort of sticking it to their father. So he can be a very tough critic about other authors. I would hope that he would feel that it is an honest book. And, you know, there are different things. He has this very late life obsession with teenage girls called the angel fish. I don't want to get into that at all. I would just now, the way you set it up, let's follow through on what this verse is. Pete Yeah. Okay, so he had the happiest marriage imaginable. His wife, Libby, every single letter that Libby ever wrote to him ends, I worship you, I idolize you, I adore you.

That was fully reciprocated. There was never any hint of scandal about Mark Twain fooling around or anything like that. She dies in 1904, so he's in his late 60s. He's very lonely. The following year, he resumes his lecture career, but he makes this strange announcement that he's only going to speak at women's colleges. He says, have the college girl habit. But then it gets, unfortunately it gets worse. Then the following year, he begins to collect

and collect is his verb, nevermind. He begins to collect teenage girls. He begins to collect teenage girls between the age of 11 and 16. There are about a dozen of them. He calls them his angel fish. He makes them members of his aquarium club. He's the only male member of the aquarium club.

He calls himself the Admiral of the aquarium club and is headquartered in his house. And he spends an extraordinary amount of time with these girls. Days, sometimes weeks on end, he spent time playing billiards with them, reading to them, playing cards, whatever. Now, he was never accused at all of groping these girls. There was no sexual impropriety. He made sure to incorporate the girls' mothers and grandm know into the whole thing. There was nothing furred of About it. He in fact enjoyed posing with these girls for the photographers

So he's almost kind of affluent again And at the time the way that it was perceived was like it well another Charming eccentricity of you know, Mark Mark Twain Mark Twain. Mark Twain, you know, loves these young girls. And in fact, there was an actress, mature actress, whom he knew who came to dinner one night dressed as a 12 year old girl,

because she said she wanted, she was envious. She wanted to become an angel fish in the aquarium club. So that was the way that it was perceived at the time, this is kind of endearing eccentricity of Mark Tran. I think anyone reading the book now, myself included, is going to find it very kind of odd and disturbing that he spends, he was spending much, much more time with these teenage girls than with his own daughters,

who by then were in their, you know, twenties, early thirties. And two of his daughters, three daughters, were still alive. They found it disturbing, interestingly enough. This disturbing in part because they interpreted as a rebuke of them because he was saying that he was lonely, he needed to have, you know, female companionship around. So they felt that it was kind of an implicit criticism of them. But they also can feel, in fact, one of the daughters, Clara, finds out that the mother, one, the angelfish, is about to publish a memoir about this and she pleads with the mother, one,

not to quote any of the letters that Mark Twain wrote to her daughter, and two, she was going to include a photo of Mark Twain's daughter, not to include the photo, so that they were picking up something that was disturbing about him. You know, it was partly, I can't get him on the analytic couch instead. disturbing about him. You know, it was partly,

I can't get him on the analytic couch instead. So in terms of what the underlying psychosexual dynamics were, we can only speculate. But he was extremely lonely. You know, one interpretation of this whole craziness was that he was trying to recreate that period in Hartford when he was rich and living in the mansion of liby and there were the three teenage daughters and he was so happy and the girls Had this unconditional love. They thought he was this magical, you know father and he had a lot of difficulty The girls adored him when they were teenagers a difficulty making a transition when they became

You know adults and more independent and sometimes more critical, you know, of their fathers. So that there were kind of a lot of different things going on, but it's kind of interesting because all of this, you know, whatever tendency he had in that direction had been suppressed during this extremely, extremely unusually happy marriage. Yeah, it definitely reads creepy.

Yeah. But the fact that so many mothers were involved and excited about him reading to them and inspiring them to pursue this stuff, I think there's also probably a theory that you could say he was replacing the fact that he didn't have any grandchildren. That was his initial explanation. He said, I woke up one morning and I

realized that I had grandfatherly feelings but I had no grandchildren. So this was the story or maybe the cover story of the whole thing. And actually the mothers and the grandmothers very much complicit in this because they were extremely proud of the fact, oh my God, my Dorothy is one of the angelfish and most famous author in the world thinks that my daughter is this remarkable person.

So they were very much kind of part of this whole phenomenon. And it was a different age. I feel like we're living through a moment in history where so many things that had been buried before, sexual assault, all sorts of different things, that no one ever used to talk about all this stuff. It's kind of risen to the surface. And so we tend to take, understandably, a much more cynical view of things. So it was a more innocent time and people tended less to psychologically

look below the surface in terms of what was going on. It won't take long to tell you Neutrol's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral, refreshingly simple. So Twain, because he was a critic as much as he was anything, I just like thinking of that question again of whether or not he would have liked this book to pivoting into just some of the other subjects. So it's all surface.

But who do you think that you've written about would have enjoyed your biography on them the most? That's a very, very good question. I do think that Mark Twain would have respected the honesty and accuracy of my book, which is kind of elaborately, you know, footnoted. So, because I think that there's been a tendency to stereotype him as just, you know,

the kind of merry man with the white suit and the cigar, and the story was much more complicated. So I think that he would have respected my desire to try to dig below the surface. I think that Hamilton might have enjoyed my book about him the most. I have a kind of contrarian streak in my nature. And so one of the reasons that I did the Hamilton book, okay, kind of go back 1998 when I started that book, long before I knew the name Lin-Manuel Miranda, when I started that book, long before I knew the name Lin-Manuel Miranda, I did that book, number one, Hamilton was becoming this forgotten founder.

People knew he was on the $10 bill. Maybe they knew that he'd died in the duel with Vice President Darren Burr, but I was reading all these books about the era and all of the books were, you know, there was the saintly Thomas Jefferson, but then there was this villainous character named Alexander Hamilton, who was always undermining Jefferson. And the more I read about him,

the more I realized that his accomplishments were perhaps equal to that of any other founder. And also, as Lynn also agreed, the most fascinating personal story of any of the founders. So it tickles me, it delights me that Hamilton is now perhaps the best of the founders, certainly the most popular of the founders. And I know for a fact that Lin-Moran Moran

and I saved Hamilton on the $10 bill because the Treasury Secretary was going to drop him, came to see the show, came backstage and told us that when he announced that because of the show, there was such a backlash against dropping Hamilton from the $10 bill that he had to abandon the idea. So we did that. But I think that Hamilton would feel that perhaps, he was very flawed. And as with Tring, with Hamilton, there was the Mariah Reynolds scandal.

I mean, there was sort of a lot of stuff too. Hamilton was not a saint at all. But I enjoyed writing that story. Again, it's that combination of a great person with a brilliant intellect, with the same time is deeply flawed in some way. We could never entirely understand that. But I think it takes someone who we might have difficulty identifying with

because they're off the charts brilliant, and humanizes them because they're off the charts, brilliant, and humanizes them because they're, you know, flawed the way that we are. But I think that Hamilton would have liked the book. I was going to guess, like, if we were doing this, we were like, hey, let's rank him who would like it the most, who would like it the least, like, maybe Pierpont would like it the least just because he was so private and wouldn't want anyone to know about any of the business dealings whatsoever in the House of Oregon or maybe Rockefeller who knows. But I think that Hamilton would get such a kick out of seeing the show and all of these

pretty women dancing around on the stage saying Alexander Hamilton. I'm sorry I interrupted you. So you're telling us there's no chance for Titan the Broadway? I don't think so. You know, when I was working on the Hamilton, I had a strong hunch that it would be dramatized. It was actually an option for a feature film three times in Hollywood before Lin-Manuel Miranda came along in Hollywood. Couldn't figure out what to do with the story. Then Lin reads the book on vacation in Mexico

and kind of a blinding flash, he sees the whole thing. And so when I met him, I was very charmed by him. I was very impressed by, he was still doing his first show in the Heights. And I thought that I wanted to be part of the show, not because I thought that it was going to be a phenomenon. It seemed like a real long shot idea, a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton.

But I had been a lifelong theater goer, and I thought it wouldn't be fun to be involved with the development of a show and boy, was it interesting. It is the perfect drama of a single figure. Yeah. Like that book reads, like I've told people like, hey, which one? And I'm like, look, you may wanna go the other way

because of the popularity, because of the play and everything. I'm like, when I got done with popularity, because of the play and everything. I'm like, when I got done with that, I put it down and went, like, what a ride. You know, like all of these elements and the villain hanging in the background and re-entering the story over and over again, you can't believe that it's true. There's maybe subjects I enjoy more than Hamilton, but I felt like the way that you did that was about as perfect a dramatic arc as you could ever create for a character.

No, that's a very special comment because Hamilton's life is structured, not because of me or because of Lin-Manuel Reyna. Hamilton's life is structured as a perfect tragedy. So you kind of go up around two thirds of the way, success upon success, and then suddenly there's a tragic fall, just about two thirds, three quarters of the way, you know, through, and the same qualities that kind of powered his rise, suddenly powering his downfall.

You know, in the case of Mark Twain, it doesn't have that kind of neat, coherent structure. It's kind of longer, it's more sprawling, it's more episodic whereas with Alexander Hamilton, you didn't need to give it a dramatic structure. The dramatic structure was actually built into the story itself, which was just gold for a biographer. I think the other one who would really be very, very pleased

about my biography would be, listen, that's Grant. Because Grant was caricatured when I started the book. Grant was still caricatured as Grant the drunk in his personal life, Grant the butcher in his professional life. And in fact, it was interesting in the Twain book, I write a lot about Twain's relationship with Grant and I had some lines I wish I had had, you know, when I wrote the Grant book. Mark Twain said of Julius S.S. Grant that he had the kindest character, you know, of anyone he had ever met. Grant was the greatest man he'd ever personally known. When Grant died, Markman wrote this beautiful elegy

and he said, manifestly, dying is nothing to really great and brave men. But I think that, um, Grant would really have felt that I had rescued him from a lot of stereotypes that had become encrusted onto his, his, his life. And he wasn't genuinely, you know, good human being and what he accomplished was quite extraordinary. I want to end on a Twain quote here that I thought really, like there's a bunch of quotes from him that you could say, Hey, this is the one that summarizes all of it. But I think it plays well with so many of your subjects.

And he says, only man's pride places him at the center of things, endowing him with an undeserved cosmic significance. And when I think about Washington, he wanted that significance. And it was exciting for me to learn about like a Lafayette coming over because he wanted significance. And at that time, an hour ago and 200 years ago, we're talking about if man is determined to be significant, really the only way that you can stand out is through war. You have that element with Grant. You have it with Pierpont who's more expected to follow in the father's footsteps and become this worldly banker and then Rockefeller's dominance financially is a whole other level. And then Twain himself finds significance by becoming the standard of American literature. When you're going back and we're talking about some of the most important people in the history of this country in shaping it for

a variety of different reasons, what do you think you've learned about these men or the men in general that stood out for their drive, their determination to be remembered by history? Well, drive determination, you put your finger on two things. What I found with all of them was that they were very, very their determination to be remembered by history. Well, drive determination, you put your finger on two things. What I found with all of them was that there was a clarity of vision

and that they were able to kind of harness all of their drive and energy and determination in terms of achieving that goal. I mean, one of the main things that made Washington such a great figure during the Revolutionary War was that here are all of these other generals who are jockeying for power. Their interest is sort of more egotistical.

And Washington keeps his eye on the ball, you know, that the objective is to win the war and to unify the country. And he was never deflected from that. And that was always very clear in his eyes. The exact same thing happened with Ulysses S. Grant, you know, that the objective The objective was to win battles, to preserve the Union, and then to abolish slavery. So clarity of the vision, know what you want to achieve, and then kind of mobilize all of your energy to the attainment of that goal. Of course, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, also a brilliant example of it.

So all the people that I have written about had this great ambition and kept their eyes on the prize. Like I said at the beginning, this is something I've wanted to do for years. So I just wanna thank you, and I'm sure there's a lot of listeners that also share the appreciation, the hours, the thousands of pages. Thank you for all the work that you've done and the enjoyment that you brought to me.

Thanks. I'm so glad that we got a chance to meet virtually and thanks folks for listening. It's been a great hour. Thank you, Ryan. Thanks, Ron. a great hour. Thank you, Ryan. Thanks, Ron. Thanks to Ron Chernow and all of his people for making this happen. Again, it's something I've been looking forward to for

a really long time. So I hope you enjoyed it as well. The Ryan Rassilla podcast, ringer Spotify. They were gonna name me Michael Jordan. My dad was like, I don't think he can live up to it. So they named me Michael Jared. Must be 21 and older and present in select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus in present DC, Kentucky or Wyoming. Gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. Call 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org forward slash chat in Connecticut or visit mdgamblinghelp.org

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