An American original.

Mark Twain: A Life, by Ron Powers (Free Press, 736 pp., $35)

SEVERAL months ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay by James Atlas bemoaning the state of biography in the United States, in comparison with the genre's long flourishing in Great Britain. Americans, Atlas concluded, lack the "biography gene." Worse yet, in their vulgar American way, they've professionalized the genre, don't you know. Around the same time came a piece by Jay Parini in The Chronicle of Higher Education, lamenting the relative indifference surrounding literary prizes in the U.S., whereas the Brits fight about the Booker et al.: clear evidence of the superior vigor of their literary culture.

After an encounter with fawning Anglophilia of this stripe, there's only one reliable antidote: a straight shot of Mark Twain. It's one of the merits of Ron Powers's new biography that he's created--while telling Twain's story--a superb mini-anthology of Twainian wit, a sovereign remedy for all manner of foolishness and pretension. To get the taste of Atlas and Parini out of one's mouth, for instance, one need only turn to the pages in which Powers quotes from Matthew Arnold's patronizing review of General Grant's memoirs--and Twain's response.

Arnold admired Grant as a man, but in the memoirs he "found a language all astray in its use of will and shall, should and would," indeed a language "without charm or distinction." Twain returned fire in a speech at the Army and Navy Club in New York on April 27, 1887. His most deadly tactic was simply to read from Arnold's review: "Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds ... " And then, Powers says, Twain delivered his "snapper": "To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk."

Bless Mark Twain, and bless Ron Powers for giving us many glimpses of the man at his best. If you haven't read a biography of Twain recently, this book will give you all you want to know about the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: his childhood in Hannibal, Mo., his meteoric rise to fame, his world travels and his excruciating business failures, his charm and his crankiness, and the demons that bedeviled him. While some biographies have the effect of embalming their subject, Powers brings his to life. His book is clearly the product of enormous research, a labor of love, yet there's nothing fussy about the writing.

That said, some vexations must be registered, ranging from minor irritation to one disagreement that gets to the core of Twain's legacy. First, then, there's the matter of Twain's names. A cadre of scholars insists that we must never refer to the writer as "Twain" but always as "Mark Twain," since the pseudonym--harking back to the days when Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi--makes sense only as a unit. Never mind that countless readers have spoken freely of "Twain" and will continue to do so. Never mind that this "rule" is precisely the sort of fetish that Twain himself ridiculed. Powers unaccountably buys it, referring to his subject as "Sam," "Clemens," or "Mark Twain," depending on the context, hopping from one to another in a very self-conscious and obtrusive way.

That's a burr, but the sort of thing that a fair-minded reader will groan over and then try to ignore. It's not as easy to ignore Powers's penchant for casting Twain as America's first rock star, a preposterous anachronism that appears to grow out of the misguided fear that Twain won't seem "relevant" to 21st-century readers unless he's tricked out in such garb. Even when Powers is not so obviously straining, his attempts to draw parallels with events in his narrative routinely misfire, as when he compares Twain's hapless brother, Orion, flitting from one bright idea to another, to Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. (Both men were "obsessed with a muddled American dream that had already failed to come true." One might just as perspicaciously compare Orion to Hamlet on the grounds that both were indecisive.)

Still, none of this is likely to distort a reader's overall sense of Twain. What might have that effect is Powers's treatment of a dark strand in Twain's thought that grew more prominent after the death at age 24 of his beloved daughter Susy, felled by meningitis in 1896. Even before Susy's death, Twain's inner weather had changed. Powers notes that the novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, completed in the early 1890s, "expresses the existentialist doubt that had beset Samuel Clemens for years, and flickered into some of his earlier works. The doubt concerned human identity, the chance that only dreams were 'real,' and reality the real 'dream.' With Pudd'nhead Wilson, that doubt gained permanent primacy in his work."

The "permanent primacy" of this theme is debatable, but Powers is fight that, in certain moods, such thoughts seemed to dominate the aging Twain's consciousness. In other moods, though, as Powers himself shows at length, the substance of Twain's dark musings was quite different from this stuff of dreams. For years he tinkered with various manuscripts in which Satan figured prominently as the author's alter ego. In this state of mind, as his daughter Clara recalled, "Father created the habit of vituperating the human race." Human beings were no more than vermin--vermin with an inflated sense of their own importance and an extraordinary ability to deceive themselves, when in fact they inhabited a meaningless deterministic universe. And so on.

While acknowledging that these late works lack "literary greatness" (the exception is "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," which Powers overestimates, I believe, as "Mark Twain's latelife masterpiece"), Powers nevertheless follows the fashion in recent Twain biography by ascribing a profundity to the nihilistic ramblings that Twain's contemporaries never saw. Here there's a hint that Twain was ahead of his time, a forerunner of the nihilistic sages of our own day--a dubious compliment.

This reading causes trouble for Powers on another front, since--again following current fashion--he wants to trumpet Twain's credentials as an "anti-imperialist." For example, in response to China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900--in which churches were destroyed and missionaries and Chinese Christians massacre--Twain said in a speech in November of that year, "I am a Boxer." Powers describes Twain's remark as "an extraordinarily daring reversal in point of view (a famous Caucasian, asserting the identity of a Chinese peasant?!) that anticipated by nearly sixty-three years President Kennedy's anticommunist declaration in West Berlin, 'Ich bin ein Berliner!'"

For some readers, the pertinence of the Kennedy parallel will be obscure; they will be more likely to think of Jane Fonda in Hanoi. But whatever one thinks of Twain's response to the Boxer Rebellion or his more penetrating criticism of America's Philippine war, these protests would be merely ridiculous if we really did inhabit the deterministic universe that Twain in his darkest vein imagined. Powers can't cogently have it both ways: He can't find the deterministic vein of Twain's thought "profound" and at the same time praise him for his moral critique of U.S. policies.

Even in his old age, Twain was not entirely in the grip of misanthropic rage and despair. If he scratched away at satanic fables, he also wrote witty letters to the girls (aged 10 to 14, mostly) who made up what he called his Aquarium Club, until his daughter Clara--fearing that some enterprising journalist would cast the business in a scandalous light--prevailed on him to break off the association. He wined and dined with interesting people, and crossed the Atlantic in 1907 to accept an honorary degree from Oxford University. (Take that, Matthew Arnold.) And his great books remain undiminished, for our instruction and delight.

Mr. Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.