BERKELEY Inspire

Ron Chernow was in a pinch.

The bestselling biographer built a reputation by burying himself in research on American icons such as John D. Rockefeller and Ulysses S. Grant. For his in-depth study of George Washington, he won a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2011. His 800-plus-page historical epic on Alexander Hamilton inspired playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda to pen the hit musical.

But when investigating the life of Mark Twain for his latest book, Chernow encountered a new challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic had just taken hold, thwarting the author’s plans to pay a visit to UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Papers & Project, or the MTP, housed within The Bancroft Library.

So Chernow explained his dilemma to the MTP, whose staff members helped by emailing him hundreds of attachments’ worth of unpublished materials from the archive.

For more than 50 years, the MTP has deepened the world’s understanding of the “father of American literature” by offering researchers its expansive expertise of the author, and stewarding the world’s largest collection of his private writings and manuscripts.

At a recent outing at the Berkeley City Club, Chernow spoke to a rapt audience about his book, which had been released the previous week. At the event, the latest gathering of the Mark Twain Luncheon Club, now in its 25th year, Chernow offered illuminating insights into Twain’s life and emphasized the importance of the MTP, which he heralded as “one of the great scholarly achievements of our time.” But the event was tinged with urgency, as the project’s future hangs in the balance.

In April, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the NEH, notified the MTP that it was ending its financial support of the project. The termination of a three-year $450,000 matching grant, scheduled to end in the fall of 2027, immediately cut off a steady stream of support that the agency had provided to the MTP, uninterrupted, since 1967. The move is part of a sweeping series of reductions in federal support that includes the termination of most NEH grants.

Here are three things we learned from the event.

The MTP is ‘biographers heaven.’

The MTP holds originals or copies of virtually every surviving document written in Twain’s hand, including dozens of notebooks, hundreds of literary manuscripts, and thousands of letters. Anyone can visit the MTP to view the treasures, and many are available online.

The MTP’s standards are high, Chernow noted. Letters and journal entries, for example, are richly annotated with notes, providing crucial context for researchers. In his talk, the author called the project “biographers heaven.”

If not for the work of the MTP, the book would have been a decadeslong undertaking, he remarked.

“This is the most outstanding group of scholars imaginable,” Chernow said of the staff at the MTP. “I feel like they have spread a banquet table of information about Mark Twain.”

Twain was plagued by his own financial woes.

Twain’s literary greatness was, in some eyes, rivaled by the magnitude of his monetary missteps. By his own admission, the author had been the “easy prey of the cheap adventurer.”

In the late 19th century, James W. Paige devised a typesetting machine that could perform the labor of five or six printers. Bedazzled by the brilliance of Paige’s invention, Twain financed the completion of the complex 18,000-part machine, contributing his own money, plus much of the inheritance of his wife, Olivia — millions of dollars by today’s standards.

But the contraption was prone to breakdowns and was surpassed by a more reliable competitor. Twain ended up losing every penny of his investment.

In Mark Twain, Chernow documents the many chapters that make up the author’s life, including his financial fiascos. The book traces the story of Twain, born Samuel Clemens, from his childhood in Missouri to his adventures as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot to his life as a literary superstar, while exploring his controversies and contradictions. Chernow also covers Twain’s later years, when the author became more fearless and outspoken, protesting injustices and sounding off on issues including slavery, women’s suffrage, antisemitism, and colonialism.

“In many ways, he acted as the conscience of American society,” Chernow said.

Support for the MTP is more important than ever.

On their way to the event, Jesse Gillette and Jason Purdy, of Alameda, finished the audiobook version of Mark Twain. At the Berkeley City Club, they got a chance to chat with Chernow — Gillette’s favorite living author — and even shared with him the name of their soon-to-be-born baby, which they’d been keeping under wraps. Chernow’s talk, Gillette said, captured “some of the humor and complications” of Twain’s life. Supporting the MTP helps keep Twain’s literary legacy alive, she added.

About 20 years ago, Half Moon Bay’s Michael Conner, also in attendance, visited the MTP, where he encountered some of its treasures and got to hold “The War Prayer” — Twain’s prose poem on the futility of armed conflict — in his hands. The trip inspired him to donate to the efforts to preserve and catalog Twain’s papers.

“Without the support, they end up in dustbins,” he said.

The MTP is one of the reasons that the libraries are “foundational elements of our university’s research mission,” Chancellor Rich Lyons said in his remarks. In light of the financial crunch, the support and engagement of donors have never been more important, he said.

“If there was ever a time to pull together — all of us together — around the libraries and this project, that time is now,” he said.