About this item
One day in late 1906, seventy-one-year-old Mark Twain attended a meeting on copyright law at the Library of Congress. The arrival of the famous author caused the usual stirbut then Twain took off his overcoat to reveal a snow-white tailored suit and scandalized the room. His shocking outfit appalled and delighted his contemporaries, but far more than that, as Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Shelden shows in this wonderful new biography, Twain had brilliantly staged this act of showmanship to cement his image, and his personal legend, in the publics imagination. That afternoon in Washington, less than four years before his death, marked the beginning of a vibrant, tumultuous period in Twains life that would shape much of the now-famous image by which he has come to be knownAmericas indomitable icon, the Man in White.
About the Author
Michael Shelden is the author of six biographies, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, Orwell: The Authorized Biography, which was also a New York Times Notable Book. For fifteen years, he was a features writer for the London Daily Telegraph, and for ten years he served as a fiction critic for the Baltimore Sun. His most recent books are Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, and Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick.
