[applause] >> David M. Rubenstein: Well, thank you again for coming, and thank you very much for writing another number one New York Times bestseller.

Do you get tired of writing number one bestsellers.

>> Ron Chernow: Not yet.

[laughs] >> David M. Rubenstein: So why did you decide to write a book on Mark Twain?

There are a lot of books on Mark Twain, so why did you decide the world needed another book on Mark Twain?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, I feel Mark Twain looms very large in the American imagination.

We all have this image of the charming, irreverent character in the white suit and the cigar dispensing all of these witticisms.

And Americans they know Tom, they know Huck, they know life on the Mississippi.

But I felt that there were so many other dimensions of his life that had not received sufficient attention.

All of the crazy business misadventures, the political crusades, the family saga, his relationship with the African American community, on and on and on.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Okay.

So how many years of research did you do on this book?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, I worked on the book for six years, so it was about four years of research and two years of writing.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And when you do research, you put things on an index card and you had 25,000 index cards afterwards?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

I have this embarrassingly low tech method.

I would not recommend it to anyone in the audience, or if there are any potential biographers out there, just don't listen to us.

Yeah.

And the reason that I do that is that I find that with these cards and I have, like, little tabs, they're in open boxes.

I find that I could actually arrange the entire narrative in the box.

So it's a laborious way to record the information.

But I could probably write as fast as anyone because it's all lined up.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Okay.

Now, one of your books was read by a guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda.

And he wrote a play about it.

Have you given him a copy of this book?

>> Ron Chernow: He has a copy of the book.

Yeah, he actually.

[laughing] I somehow don't picture Mark Twain's life moving to a hip hop beat, but I didn't exactly picture Alexander Hamilton's either.

So you never know how things marinate in his brain.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, Mark Twain, let's go through the basics of his life.

When was he born?

>> Ron Chernow: Okay.

He was born in 1835.

He was born in the town of Florida, Missouri.

That's all the way in the northeast corner of Missouri.

The population of the town was 100.

So he said when he was born, he increased the population by 1 percent.

He said there's no record of anyone else doing as much, not even Shakespeare.

[laughing] >> David M. Rubenstein: And who were his parents?

Were they writers or anything?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, his father, John Marshall Clemens, was a very cold and distant man, failed at one business after another that left Twain with this lifelong dread of poverty.

He'd been a lawyer, a justice of the peace, a failed storekeeper.

The one who really influenced him was his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens.

She was a very spirited, vivacious woman.

She had the same slow drawl and dry wit that he had.

I'll give you one example.

In later years, he was talking with his mother about the fact that he'd been a premature baby that was sickly.

And so Twain said to Jane Clemens, you must have been worried about me all the time.

She said, "Oh, yeah.

All the time."

And he said, "I'm afraid that I wouldn't make it."

And this deadpan worthy of her son said, "No, I'm afraid you would."

[laughing] It's such a Mark Twain line that I kind of picture him hearing those things in his childhood.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So when he was growing up, did he say, "I want to be a writer," or what did he want to be when he was growing up?

>> Ron Chernow: No, actually he lived in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, again, tucked way up into the northeast corner of the state.

A beautiful bucolic rural area.

And the royalty was the Mississippi River pilot.

In fact, if you go to Hannibal today, his boyhood home is still there.

And when he walked out the door and he looked immediately to the left, there are just a block or two away.

It was this broad, magnificent, shining waterway that was almost a mile wide.

And so he managed to get his license pilot in two years.

He was tremendously proud of that.

And the riverboat pilots really were royalty.

He actually, he was in his 20s.

He was making a salary equivalent to that of the vice president of the United States.

He suddenly started wearing fancy clothes and flashing big bills.

And he said that was the darling existence of his life.

But then the Civil War broke out and all commerce was shut on the Mississippi.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And in the Civil War, he fought for about a week and then quit.

>> Ron Chernow: He took two weeks in this kind of ragtag Confederate militia.

He confessed that he was a coward.

He said, “I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.” [laughing] He was not eager to confront the enemy.

But then he got lucky because his older brother, Orion was appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, decided to bring along his kid brother Sam as his private secretary.

And it took them 18 days behind teams of horses and mules to get to the Nevada Territory.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Right.

So he goes out there with his brothers, working for his brother, when does he start writing?

He starts writing articles under his own name or somebody else's name?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, what happens was, when he first got out there because he was his brother's private secretary, there wasn't anything to do at first.

And so he said that he succumbed to the money madness just to locate this Virginia City, Carson City.

This was the site of the Comstock Lode, the biggest silver mining bonanza in American history.

So he said that he succumbed to the money madness.

And he went out there and he tried his hand at mining, and he was dead broke.

He was so broke that he said if he had been offered a salary for translating the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would have accepted it.

[laughing] And he was... He'd been writing a little satiric scriibs for a newspaper called the "Territorial Enterprise," and they offered him a job as the city editor.

He said he really didn't have much of a background in journalism.

So he said his first day on the job, He was petrified how he would fill up his first column.

And he said, and then a desperado killed a man in a saloon, and joy returned once more.

[laughing] And he was off and running.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So when did he start writing books?

How many books did he write in his lifetime?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, this is interesting because, again, everyone knows Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, "Life on the Mississippi."

He actually wrote more than two dozen books.

He wrote a book about, Mary Baker Eddy.

He thought she was a charlatan, a megalomaniac.

He wrote a book about Shakespeare.

He was convinced that Francis Bacon had written all the books, attributed Shakespeare.

He wrote a novel about Joan of Arc, which he thought was his best book.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, when he writes books, some authors like you, when you write a book, you do the research, you write the book.

You write one book at a time.

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: He tended to write three or four at a time.

How did he manage that?

>> Ron Chernow: He had this very peculiar, eccentric habit that he would work on a book for about six months, and then he would run out of steam, and then maybe the following summer he would pick it up again.

So it was not unusual for him to be working on two or three manuscripts.

For instance, Huck Finn, he worked on off and on over a seven-year period.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So the first famous book he wrote was that “Tom Sawyer?” >> Ron Chernow: No, actually, the first famous book, "In The Innocents Abroad."

This is what made him famous and rich, that he signed on to an early tourist cruise to Europe and the Holy Land.

And he was filing letters with a paper called the "Alta California."

Said that by the time the tour ended, he was already famous.

Now, at the time, this was one of the early American tourist cruises, at the time, Americans tended to fawn over European culture.

And Twain wrote about European culture in this very sort of brash, irreverent style.

So, for instance, they kept going to museums and he grew to hate the old masters.

He said, "All the old masters are dead."

He said, "I only wish they had died sooner."

[laughing] They went to the Sistine Chapel, which Twain called Michelangelo's Nightmare full of repulsive monstrosities.

Funniest of all, they went to see Da Vinci's, "The Last Supper," and there were a lot of people who were making copies as he was looking at it, and he said, I couldn't help but notice that all of the copies were superior to the original.

[laughing] So this is the spirit in which.

And it caught on.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn."

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: That book is considered by some to be one of the great American novels of all time.

And I think Hemingway said it was the beginning of great American literature.

What is it about "Huckleberry Finn" that made it so spectacular a book?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

Well, just stylistically, as you all know, the book is narrated by Huck.

Now, at that time, in serious literature, there would be an omniscient third person narrator who would be telling you what to think about these characters.

Suddenly, here's this book, not only narrated by this boy, but in his own vernacular, you know, his own everyday language.

And Mark Twain was able to take the language of an everyday person, really, to this uneducated kid, and make it poetic and sort of what you see is what Huck sees, not what Twain sees in the story.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So as he's writing books, he seems to be moving further east.

He moves back to the east.

Why does he move to Hartford, Connecticut and live there?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, we have to talk about [inaudible] Livy because, while he's on that boat and incidentally, that book, "The Innocents Abroad," sold 100,000 copies, a gigantic amount for the time.

And he never equaled that sale again, not even with "Huck Finn."

But while he's on the boat, he meets a young man named Charley Langdon, who shows him this little ivory miniature portrait of his sister Livy.

And Twain said that from that moment on, Livy Langdon was never out of his heart or mind.

He married Livy with a great deal of effort, because Twain was from this backwater.

He looked rather seedy and disreputable.

Livy had a very aristocratic upbringing in Elmira, New York.

She was an heiress.

Her father had created a fortune in coal and timber.

And Mark Twain pursued her relentlessly.

He sent her 200 very long romantic love letters, so many that she began to annotate them [laughing] like a whole file.

But finally, what happened, because the Langdons were very, very charmed by this man.

He was so fascinating and funny, but they were uneasy.

Livy was physically very fragile young woman.

She also was destined to inherit all this money.

So the father, Mr.

Langdon, asked Mark Twain to have his friends out West, send ten letters of recommendation.

The ten letters come in, and all of them describe Mark Twain as idle and lecherous, [laughing] drunken and wild.

So Mr.

Langdon sits down with Mark Twain and says, "Don't you have a friend in the world?"

[laughing] Twain shrugs his shoulders and says, "apparently not.

And Mr.

Langdon says, "Well, then I'll be your friend I know you better than they do.

Go, take the girl."

In other words, Livy.

And it was a really prophetic call because this was such a happy marriage.

There's almost not a letter from Livy to Mark Twain that doesn't end, "I adore you, I worship you, I idolize you."

It's very touching.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So they're married for how many years?

>> Ron Chernow: They're married for how many years?

Okay, so from 1877, 34 years.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Okay.

And they have how many children?

>> Ron Chernow: They have three daughters.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Okay.

And his wife... >> Ron Chernow: And also a son who dies.

>> David M. Rubenstein: His wife predeceases him.

>> Ron Chernow: This is a very sad story.

This man who made us laugh more than anyone else, he ends up burying his wife, burying his son, burying two of his three daughters, burying his adored younger brother, etc... >> David M. Rubenstein: So in addition to his writing career, he had a different career as almost a stand-up comedian, where he would go out and just make jokes about things in front of a live audience.

What was that career all about?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah it was interesting because Mark Twain, I think, was the first one who took the lecture circuit, and the lecture circuit was really burgeoning, the Chautauqua circuit, after the Civil War.

I think that he was really the first one who used the lecture circuit as part of promoting a book.

[laughing] And he would tell funny stories about his experiences out West.

He also began to read excerpts like it was actually with "Huck Finn" in 1885.

That was the first time he began reading excerpts in one of his books.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So when he would do this, he had a white uniform he kind of wore a white outfit.

Where did that white outfit that come about?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah, the white outfit as a full time outfit was only the last four years of his life.

I mean, he would occasionally wear white earlier on, but what happened in 1906, he went down... Came down to Washington to lobby about a copyright bill, and suddenly he appeared in this white suit.

He also would wear, like, raspberry or lemon colored socks.

And the reporters were startled to see him in this all white outfit, and they said to him, what is this all about?

And he said, "This is the uniform of the American Association of Purity and Perfection, of which I am president and sole member.

[laughing] And he hated the fact that men all wore dark suits.

And he said that the men's dark suits accumulated so much dirt that you could plant seeds in them and grow crops.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So what about the mustache and the hair.

What was all that about?

>> Ron Chernow: That image was always there, and he was very obsessed with his with his hair.

His long-time housekeeper, Katie Leary, said that every day Mark Twain used to have Katie rub his head.

He was convinced that if his head was rubbed, that he would not lose his hair.

And actually, he was right because he had this amazingly full head of unruly hair.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So he becomes one of the best known people in the United States, not just... >> Ron Chernow: Probably the best-known person after the president, yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And did he ever consider going into politics?

Do he like politicians?

>> Ron Chernow: He started out being very apolitical.

He became extremely political.

His opinions of politicians may strike some of us as odd.

He thought the greatest politician of his lifetime was Grover Cleveland.

Probably not first on most historians list.

He really couldn't stand Teddy Roosevelt.

It was... He went to lunch with Teddy Roosevelt, and it bothered him.

Teddy Roosevelt kept dragging in the Rough Riders, but he said, of Teddy Roosevelt... Said, "Teddy Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of American politics.

Always hunting for attention."

He said, for Teddy Roosevelt said, the vast republic is one great Barnum circus, of which he is the clown, and the whole world is his circus.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And what did he think of members of Congress?

>> Ron Chernow: Oh my God, even worse.

[laughing] No.

I mean, some of the things he said about some of his famous lines.

He said, "There's no Native American criminal class except the Congress."

Or another time he said, "Suppose you're a congressman and suppose you're an idiot, but I repeat myself."

[laughing] Or he also said that he said, "I say, and I say it with pride, that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any other in the world."

>> David M. Rubenstein: So he's a very good writer, very good stand-up comedian, but he's not that good a businessman.

>> Ron Chernow: He's a dreadful businessman.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So how did he feel that he was such a good businessman?

He was putting all of his money into projects don't go anywhere.

Then he takes his wife's money.

And what happens to that?

>> Ron Chernow: Well he said late in life, ruefully, he said, "I was always the easy prey of some cheap adventurer."

And he poured millions of dollars into different inventions.

And the problem was, he was not investing in existing companies that had a profit stream.

He was essentially acting as a one man venture capitalist.

So he poured the most money into something called the Paige typesetter.

Now the Paige typesetter was supposed to replace like 5 or 6 printers.

And he said that James Paige, the inventor, was the Shakespeare of mechanical invention.

It was an ingenious machine.

It was 18,000 moving parts.

Twain was convinced that every newspaper, not just in the country, but in the world, would have to buy the Paige typesetter.

And you could see in his notebooks, page after page, he's adding up the number of newspapers in the world, and he's convinced that it will make him, as he said, one of the Vanderbilt gang.

The problem was it was a very ingenious machine, but it was prone to breakdown.

So the machine that did revolutionize the newspaper world was Ottmar Mergenthalers machine.

The Paige machine went bust.

And then Twain goes from idolizing James Paige to abhorring him and saying that if Paige was drowning, I would have thrown him an anvil.

[laughing] >> David M. Rubenstein: So he goes through his fortune.

Then he mostly goes through his wife's fortune.

Does she ever complain about that?

>> Ron Chernow: No, because probably about two thirds of the money that went into the Paige compositor was Olivia's inheritance.

And I read thousands of letters between them, she never once complained.

I mean, this really was an adoring woman, and there was just such nobility I have to think that any other wife would have thrown that in his face.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So his financial situation was so bad, at some point, he thought he'd have a cheaper lifestyle by moving to Europe.

What was that about?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

After 17 years they give up.

They were living in a house in Hartford that was 25 rooms with six servants.

He was living like royalty.

So in order to economize, they go to Europe, sometimes... And they lived in Berlin and Vienna, England, Paris, Florence.

At times it's hard to see how he was saving any money.

They lived in this Villa Viviani outside of Florence that had 28 rooms.

Were they living in this hotel suite in Vienna Hotel Suite of six bedrooms.

And this was their idea of economizing.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So was he well known in Europe that people respect him there.

>> Ron Chernow: Immediately, yeah.

He had... In fact, it was interesting because even after when he was in his early 40s and he went to England, he published at that point may be three books.

He was startled when he went to London, how popular he was.

And he was feted at the banquet hall.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, how many years was he overseas?

>> Ron Chernow: Altogether, well, after he went bankrupt and they were "Economizing," that was nine years.

But then he also... Livy when he went bankrupt, she had this very aristocratic attitude towards bankruptcy.

She felt that it was disgrace and shame in the eyes of the world, and that they had to repay every penny on the dollar.

So Twain, along with Livy and one of the daughters, they did this Around the World lecture tour.

Went across North America, down through Hawaii and in Sri Lanka, India, South Africa.

It was really quite exhausting to do, but after about 4 or 5 years, he was finally able to pay off all of the creditors.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, how much would somebody pay to hear him speak?

Would he get $5,000 in those days?

10,000 to speak?

What...?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

I don't know whether it would come to now, but the lecture agencies that he used at the time would book him like for 100, 110 lectures in the season.

So it was very, very exhausting.

And he hated lecturing.

You have to remember, now, if you're a lecturer, you're jumping on one plane after another.

At that time, it meant a very long train trips from one town to the next.

He was constantly staying in seedy fleabag hotels in small towns.

He grew to really hate chambermaids because they would come in and wake him up at 7 o'clock in the morning.

It was grueling to do.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So when he comes back to the United States eventually, does he continue a life of writing books and what happened to his wife?

hWhen did she pass away?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, he comes back in 1900 and she passes away 1904.

She had congestive heart failure.

But it's interesting what happens when he comes back to the United States, that he had always been reluctant to voice a lot of his more extreme political opinions, particularly about anything dealing with race.

He was afraid he would alienate his white southern readers.

He comes back from Europe.

The reporters all gather at the dock in New York, and he immediately begins making very strong statements about American politics.

The US, had colonized the Philippines.

And he makes this statement.

He said that our soldiers in the Philippines are carrying disgraced muskets under a polluted flag.

These are very strong language that we were... >> David M. Rubenstein: Right.

>> Ron Chernow: And there was tremendous public outcry.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So after his wife passes away, he has one daughter is living at the end, he begins a practice that strikes people today as a little unusual, but in the time, not so much.

Can you describe his little girlfriends that he had.

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah, yeah.

Alas.

[laughing] Well, okay.

So his wife dies in 1904 after this very, very happy marriage.

In 1905, he resumes lecturing, but he suddenly announces, "I have the college girl habit."

And so he decides he's only going to lecture at women's colleges.

So he talks at Barnard.

He talks about Vassar.

But wait, it gets worse.

[laughing] And then a year later, he begins “to collect”.

And this is his verb, not mine.

He begins to collect teenage girls from 10 to 16 years old.

And they become members of his aquarium club.

He calls them his angelfish.

He calls himself the admiral.

Now, I have to say, in fairness, he was never, ever accused of any kind of sexual misbehavior or groping or anything like that In fact, he actually would incorporate the mothers and the grandmothers into these visits.

But he became obsessed with these girls.

About half of his correspondents in his final years is with these teenage girls, and he's spending much more time.

Two of his three daughters were still alive at that point.

He was spending much more time with his angelfish than with his own daughters.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And how do you explain all that?

And after spending time researching him, is it just an innocent kind of fascination with young girls?

>> Ron Chernow: It was funny when he was on the river.

This was long before he met Livy He had met a 14-year-old girl named Laura Wright.

they spend three days together.

Again, it was completely chaste.

And then they parted, and he was brokenhearted.

He was in his early 20s at the time.

He never forgot her.

He would mark the anniversary of the end of this three day really kind of romance and non-romance.

And he wrote something.

This gets weirder and weirder.

He wrote something in his later years called "My Platonic Sweetheart."

He had this recurring dream, about seeing this same teenage girl.

In each new dream.... In one dream, her hair might be blonde.

It might be black in the next dream.

But it was clearly the same girl.

And they were in a different country.

They were in a different place.

And he said that, she was as real to him as any person.

And that those were among the pleasantest experiences of his life.

These dream reunions.

And so he decided this was just a few years before Livy dies.

He decides to write this essay called "My Platonic Sweetheart," in which he describes in great detail all of the different dreams.

Well, you can imagine how his wife felt when she saw this.

And she spiked it.

He wanted to publish it in a magazine so that there was this kind of recurring fantasy about this teenage girl, but it was chaste... Even in the dreams, it's interesting.

Like they kind of sit holding hands or something.

It's peculiar.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So it is often said that Winston Churchill spent a lifetime preparing spontaneous remarks because... He prepared these remarks.

But they weren't as spontaneous as you'd like people to think.

Did Twain come up with these things on the top of his head, or did he spend a lot of time preparing these very funny statements, and then he used them at the right time?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, two things, David.

I was very relieved when I started doing the book because I always figured Mark Twain was the most spontaneous wit in American history.

But what he would do in his early lectures, he would write out the entire speech, including things that were intended to sound like spontaneous asides.

He would actually write out three speeches, and he had such a good mind that if he was giving the audience speech one and it was not going over, he would switch into speech two.

If that wasn't going over, he would switch.

And imagine how hard that was to do.

But in terms of the Mark Twain quotes, and we all have favorite Mark Twain quotes, these are things that were actually manufactured as quotes.

And you could see in his notebook he would rewrite sometimes five, ten, 15 times the same quote until he got the exact phrasing that he wanted.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So one of the most famous of his quotes is something like people reported that he was dying or something, and he wrote something about his death was premature or something like that?

Is that what wrote?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

I mean, he had more jokes about his own death than I think any... Yeah.

So what happened late 1890s is living in London, and there were reports in New York that Twain was dying.

So an editor for the New York Journal dispatched a reporter to Twain in London, with the following instructions: If you find that Mark Twain is dying in poverty in London, send 500 words.

If you find that Mark Twain has died in poverty in London, send 1000 words.

So suddenly, this reporter is knocking on Twain's door in London to see if he's alive.

And Twain answers the door and tells him that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, which became one of his most famous lines.

But I discovered it was far from his only line.

Then year or two later the Associated Press contacted him about reports of his death and he said, "I would do no such thing at my time of life."

[laughing] My favorite one, actually, and this was sort of pretty close to the end of his life.

His daughter Jean... they were living in Connecticut.

His daughter Jean came and said that there was someone in the living room who was there to see him.

And Twain said to the daughter, "Jean, I can't see her.

I might die at any moment, and it would be so embarrassing.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So do you have a favorite line of all the lines he's famous for?

Is there one that sticks out in your mind as the funniest, or among the funniest, or the ones you most enjoy?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, kind of two favorites.

One because it's funny and the other because it's thought provoking.

In terms of the funny one, he said, "Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience.

That is the ideal life."

I always like that.

In terms of something that he said that was thought provoking He said the two most important days of your life, the day you were born and the day you find out why.

[laughing] >> David M. Rubenstein: And toward the end of his life, he became a publisher.

He bought a publishing... >> Ron Chernow: Middle of his life, yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: The middle of his life as a publisher.

And one of the people he published was Ulysses S. Grant, who you also wrote a book about.

And people thought at the time that Ulysses S. Grant, a general, maybe not the most literate person of all time, that he could not have possibly written a book that many people say is the best book ever written by a person who became president of United States.

Did Samuel Clemens really write that book for him?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, I have a Library of Congress story here, cause when I was doing the Grant book, so many people asked me whether Mark Twain had been the ghostwriter of it, that I went to the Library of Congress.

They first wanted me to look at the original manuscript on microfilm, and I said.

"No."

They said, when I go do interviews about this, people are going to want me to have examined the actual manuscript.

So they rolled it out in these beautiful blue leather bound volumes, and I went through every single page of Grant's manuscript of his memoirs.

And it was just about all in his and writing.

And I don't think that Twain would have been any more able to imitate Grant's literary style, that Grant would have been able to imitate Twain.

>> David M. Rubenstein: And in the end, the publication made a lot of money for both Samuel Clemens and for Ulysses S. Grant's family?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

Actually, it was possibly the bestselling book of the 19th century.

It sold in these two-volume box sets.

They sold 300,000 sets, which was extraordinary.

Now, because this was Twain's first list on his publishing house, believe it or not, was Grant's memoirs and "Huckleberry Finn."

So Twain, of course, thought, I'm a genius as a publisher.

He wasn't.

He signed up the authorized memoir.

Authorized... I'm sorry.

It was authorized biography of the Pope, and the Pope at the time was Leo XIII.

We now have Leo XIV.

Leo XIII was a very transformative pope.

But Mark Twain got so excited about this, he was convinced that every Catholic in Christendom would run out to buy the Pope's biography.

He was wrong about that.

In fact, he sent his deputy, Charles Webster, to Rome to meet with the Pope, and Charles Webster passed along to the Pope this idea that all these Catholics were going to run out to buy the book.

The Pope himself was very dubious about this.

He was very curious about the sale of Grant's book, but he was certain that his book would not attract that attention.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So he was born with the name Samuel Clemens.

Where did the name Mark Twain come from?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah, this goes back this was to his days in Nevada.

A lot of the comic writers at that time would adopt these pen names, like one of the most famous, humorists of the time.

Petroleum V. Nasby.

That was Lincoln's favorite.

And so Mark Twain, he went back to his experience on the Mississippi River.

On the river, what they called the leadsman would drop a weighted rope over the side to gauge the depth of the water, and then would yell back over his shoulder, "Mark Twain, Mark Twain."

And what that meant: Mark Twain was two fathoms or 12 feet.

And that was considered a fairly safe thing.

So that was where it came from.

And actually, Helen Keller, whom we became very good friends with, Helen Keller, said to him once, she thought it was the perfect name because it suggested something both sort of light and frothy and rippling and also but something with depth.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So what age does he die?

>> Ron Chernow: He dies at 74 >> David M. Rubenstein: What does he die from?

>> Ron Chernow: He dies from angina.

Mark Twain had smoked up to 40 cigars a day his entire life.

He started smoking cigars when he was around 8 or 9 years old, and he was always insistent, and you research his life.

The guy constantly has chronic bronchitis.

He's constantly in bed, coughing away.

But he's very adamant.

He was very stubborn that his health was not affected by the cigars.

Finally, in the final months of his life, his doctors forced him to cut down from 40 cigars a day to four cigars a day.

And for the first time, he starts talking about his tobacco heart, and he admits that he'd been very foolish all those years in arguing that it had not affected his health.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So you've now spent five, six, seven years with Mark Twain.

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: You admire him more than you did before you began or not as much as you thought you were going to?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, I'm much more amazed than I was.

As I said, his interest was so much wide ranging.

His activity was so much wide ranging.

He was a much more difficult personality than I thought that I would encounter.

Again, you know, sort of know the charm, the humor, the irreverence.

He could be moody, he could be temperamental.

And one thing we haven't talked about in terms of the marriage was that Livy really had to kind of train him how to function in polite society.

So, she had a system of color coded cards at a dinner party.

If she flashed a blue card, that meant, "Are you going to monopolize the lady to your right all evening?"

If she flashed a red card, it meant, "Are you going to sit there and say nothing all evening?"

And the the daughters loved watching this.

Their daughters called this “mother dusting our father.” And Twain made the statement that, "Livy edited my books and then she edited me."

And it was really true.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So if you had a chance to interview Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens, is there one or two questions you would like to ask him?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah, I was particularly, you always as a biographer, you're always interested in the silences.

And the big silence was really about his father.

He talked a lot about his mother.

John Marshall Clemens, made a couple of statements about his relationship with his father.

One, he said, "My knowledge of my father amounted to little more than an introduction."

Pretty chilling statement.

He also said of his relationship with his father that it amounted to a state of armed neutrality.

So he clearly feared his father.

It was clear the enormous amount of tension.

And I think that this kind of wisecracking, smart-alecky personality that he develops as a teenager, I think was his way of dealing with this fear of the father.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Now, the books you've written have all been bestsellers, are about very prominent people.

John D. Rockefeller, Warburgs.

Also Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize, Hamilton.

But these people all have one thing in common.

They're all dead at the time you write the book.

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Have you thought about writing a book about somebody whos alive or that wouldn't be as appealing?

>> Ron Chernow: I like books about people who are nice and dead.

[laughing] I mean, nice and dead.

The dead don't tell their friends not to cooperate with you.

The dead don't write nasty letters to you afterwards.

The dead don't sue you for libel.

They're just nice and dead and their cemetery talks.

[laughing] >> David M. Rubenstein: So now you don't like to talk about the next book you're gonna write, and you're probably gonna pick a subject.

But when you pick that subject, will it be another 4 or 5 years of research and writing?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

I'm kind of I'm on the downhill side of the slope.

[laughs] So I project how old I'll be, when the next book comes out.

So I'm aware that there are not as many books ahead of me as there are behind me.

But at this point in my life, I kind of project five years for a book.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Okay.

And for somebody who's an aspiring author who wants to be Ron Chernow, any advice about how to be prepared to be a great writer?

You didn't prepare to be a book writer, you were thinking about something else in college.

Is that right?

>> Ron Chernow: Yeah.

My career was completely accidental career I did study history in college.

I did two degrees in English literature.

Then I was a freelance magazine writer for ten years.

I worked for three years in a public policy foundation.

I'd done a number of different things.

And so the history that I've given people in the books, the history is self-taught.

But what I had thought about for many years was narrative.

And in a way, I think that it's easier to learn the facts of history than to master narrative And narrative was something that I'd been thinking about for a long time.

>> David M. Rubenstein: The people you've written about, I mentioned them.

Is there one person you most admire.

Is it George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John D. Rockefeller, somebody you really admire them for what they did or no one person?

>> Ron Chernow: I guess in terms of just the quality of their mind.

Hamilton and and Twain.

There are certainly interesting parallels between them.

I mean, they both were self-invented characters, very little formal education.

They were both autodidacts, everything that they read was kind of retrained and retrieved, very charming and attractive personalities, but also very flawed characters at the same time.

I mean, in terms of character, certainly George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant.

>> David M. Rubenstein: When somebody named Lin-Manuel Miranda called you and said, "I'm gonna write a play about Hamilton,” did you tell him he didn't know what he was doing or what did you think?

>> Ron Chernow: Well, the story was this, I found out through a mutual friend that he had read my Hamilton book on vacation, wanted to meet me.

And so when I met him, he was still starring in his first show, “In the Heights.” I went backstage and I said, "So I gather my book made an impression on you."

And he said, "Ron, as I was reading the book, hip hop songs started rising off the page" [laughing] which was not a typical response to one of my books.

[laughing] And he asked me on the spot to be the historical adviser to what he was then calling a concept album that became the musical.

But I had to immediately admit to him, I said, "Lin, I'm a complete ignoramus about hip hop."

And he said to me, "I'm gonna educate you in hip hop."

And he started talking about the fact that with hip hop you have rhymed endings, you have internal rhyme, you have wordplay and all these different things.

So you can't say that I'm an expert on hip hop now, but I know a little bit more than I did then.

But at the time that I met him, we started working together.

I never... Nobody ever dreamt that this was gonna be a sensation.

Quite the contrary.

We all went through seven years of everyone thinking that this was the silliest idea ever.

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, do you imagine George Washington's in heaven sitting there next to Hamilton, being upset that he, Washington, was the boss of Hamilton, yet he, Washington doesn't have a famous play about him, and Hamilton does.

[laughing] >> Ron Chernow: I think even more Jefferson sitting up there must be.

[laughing] >> David M. Rubenstein: Probably true.

[applause] So for a writer, though, to become a writer, what is the best way to be skilled and prepared to be a writer of the kind that you are?

What was it to force [inaudible] >> Ron Chernow: It's just Monkey see, monkey do.

Just to be reading all of the time.

W. H. Auden said that sometimes when a parent would bring a child and say, my son, my daughter wants to be a poet, the one question... The first question that Auden always had was does he or she love language?

And I think that that's the basis of all of it.

And if you don't adore words.

When I was 14 or 15, I used to buy these paperbacks with titles like "How to Increase Your Word Power."

I mean, I was just obsessed with language.

>> David M. Rubenstein: So how many people here have seen Hamilton?

Oh, wow.

How many people have read a Ron Chernow book?

Okay.

How many people have read Mark Twain?

How many people are going to read Mark Twain?

Okay.

Look, Ron, I wanna thank you for your contribution to American literature.

And thank you for being here.

[applause] >> Ron Chernow: Thank you.

>> David M. Rubenstein: You're welcomed.

>> Ron Chernow: Thank you, David.

[applause] [upbeat music]