Mr. Kaplan won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1967 for his first book, “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. “It is too easy to sentimentalize him as the foxy grandpa of American letters, the author of wholesome books for the young,” Mr. Kaplan. “Twain was a man with an extremely dark imagination and a low threshold of annoyance.” Thomas Lask wrote, “Not in years has there been a biography in which the complexities of human character have been exposed with such perceptiveness, with such a grasp of their contradictory nature, with such ability to keep each strand clear and yet make it contribute to the overall fabric.” He added, “Mr. Kaplan shows how badly Twain was split down the middle.” The biography, which also received a National Book Award, employed an organizing device, unusual for its day, to which Mr. Kaplan would return. Instead of arranging his subject’s life chronologically, he portrayed it out of sequence, opening the book with Twain at 31. The decision let Mr. Kaplan start Twain’s story just after the formative years of the Civil War, when Samuel Langhorne Clemens was gaining renown as a writer.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 23:13:30 +0000
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