Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

In 1898, 36 years after he invented his pen name, Sam Clemens signed a hotel register ""S.L. Clemens, Profession, Mark Twain."" Hoffman (Twain's Heroes. Twain's Worlds) congratulates himself for employing as biographical springboard the idea that an imaginative Missouri upstart, Sam Clemens, became the ambitious, fortune-hunting Samuel Langhorne Clemens as well as the public persona Mark Twain. The conflicting personalities, Hoffman contends, clashed during the ups and downs of a troubled if triumphant lifetime. Such introductory ingenuity flashes warning signals, and indeed, among Hoffman's reinterpretations is a shaky one about his subject's early newspaper days in California. In the small print of an endnote he confesses, ""I acknowledge that my hypothesis of Clemens' homosexual behavior, though circumstantially documented, can never be proven."" Readers will find the theory as unpersuasive as many of the gold-rush claims of that era. The biography improves when Hoffman eschews such suppositions and concentrates on Clemens's growth as a writer and as a public figure, and on his self-destructive greed in trying to parlay his royalties into quick wealth through one ill-considered investment or invention scheme after another. His most profitable capital outlay proved always to be his invented persona, Mark Twain, yet family tragedies and financial flip-flops would sap his creative energies. In his final decades, writing little that mattered, he metamorphosed into a sardonic public moralist prospering from his platform manner and Twainian reputation. Extracts from unpublished letters enrich the biography more than Hoffman's speculations do, and the biographer's best pages examine the downside of success. The 70-year-old Clemens died in 1910. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)