Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’