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What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens

It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books

7 June 2025

9:00 AM

7 June 2025

9:00 AM

Mark Twain Ron Chernow

Penguin Press, pp.1200, 35

You know Mark Twain’s story. You’ve got no excuse not to; there have been so many biographies. Starting in the American South as Samuel Clemens, he took his pen name from the call of the Mississippi boatmen on reaching two fathoms. His lectures, followed by his travel pieces and novels, enchanted America and then the world.

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