Book Review

Dangerous Water is a fascinating and occasionally frustrating portrait of the boyhood of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The journalist and novelist Ron Powers provides deep background on the famed novelist. He convincingly shows that the adult Mark Twain retained the sheen of his youth, endlessly reworking and recycling events, characters, perceptions, and fantasies from his days along the Mississippi River.	1
Duality abounds in Powers's book: Clemens versus Twain, public versus private, humorist versus social critic, erstwhile populist and de facto elitist. Above all, Powers argues, there was tension between Clemens the boy and Twain the man. Like America itself, Twain straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moving from frontier rawness to cosmopolitan comforts. To underscore that point, Powers ends his study when Twain adopts his literary nom de plume at the end of his river pilot career. Powers follows with a coda that completes the boy-to-man saga: Twain's triumphant 1902 return to Hannibal, Missouri.	2
Powers is best when exploding Twain mythology. He probes the gap between the Clemens family's perceived social status and its financial desperation. It is well known that Twain patterned the Hawkins family of The Gilded Age (1873) on his own family's misfortunes. But Powers goes further by showing there was little ennobling, virtuous, or advantageous about his boyhood poverty. This makes Twain's literary, rhetorical, and observational excellence all the more remarkable.	. . .