Ron Chernow

Seated Show

Each ticket includes a hardcover copy of Mark Twain and a bookplate signed by Ron Chernow.

Boswell Book Company and the Pabst Theater Group present a special evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow at the Turner Hall Ballroom. Chernow appears with his latest book, Mark Twain, in which he illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature.

Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first and most influential literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.

Ron Chernow is the prizewinning author of seven previous books, including The House of Morgan, which won the National Book Award, Washington: A Life which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the Broadway musical. Chernow has received the National Humanities Medal and is one of only three living biographers to have won the Gold Medal for Biography of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A past president of PEN America, Chernow has been the recipient of nine honorary doctorates.