An American original.(Mark Twain: A Life)(Book review)

Mark Twain: A Life, by Ron Powers (Free Press, 736 pp., $35)

SEVERAL months ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay by James Atlas bemoaning the state of biography in the United States, in comparison with the genre's long flourishing in Great Britain. Americans, Atlas concluded, lack the "biography gene." Worse yet, in their vulgar American way, they've professionalized the genre, don't you know. Around the same time came a piece by Jay Parini in The Chronicle of Higher Education, lamenting the relative indifference surrounding literary prizes in the U.S., whereas the Brits fight about the Booker et al.: clear evidence of the superior vigor of their literary culture.

After an encounter with fawning Anglophilia of this stripe, there's only one reliable antidote: a straight shot of Mark Twain. It's one of the merits of Ron Powers's new biography that he's created--while telling Twain's story--a superb mini-anthology of Twainian wit, a sovereign remedy for all manner of foolishness and pretension. To get the taste of Atlas and Parini out of one's mouth, for instance, one need only turn to the pages in which Powers quotes from Matthew Arnold's patronizing review of General Grant's memoirs--and ...