Inventing Mark Twain is not a biography of Mark Twain, but one of "Sam." Andrew Hoffman writes how Sam Clemens lives his life as three distinct personalities: First, there was Sam Clemens, the private person he really was that very few people outside of his family ever knew. From Sam Clemens grew Mark Twain, the famous author, lecturer, public persona, and celebrity. Arriving later is S.L. Clemens, the persona that Sam adopted to be to everyone when he wasn't Mark Twain; S.L. Clemens was a genteel Hartford aristocrat that could perfectly entertain high society. Yet throughout the book, Hoffman always refers to its subject as "Sam."

He does this to illustrate the thesis of his book: almost every action in the life of Sam Clemens reflects the total insecurity and struggle that Sam had as an individual. Hoffman writes that popular opinion is that Sam invented Mark Twain because his own ego was too large to fit one persona; Hoffman strongly disagrees. To completely create a person's image (in Sam's case, two new people), one must either have no ego at all or be so completely insecure with their "real" self that they can completely occupy a new one. Sam's insecurity, Hoffman elaborates, was the force behind all of his writings and actions.

Hoffman makes a number of assumptions that, taken alone, seem to be a stretch, but when viewed in context, make sense. His discussion of Mark Twain's literature strongly supports his thesis. Sam felt a bit of insecurity in writing Innocents Abroad and Roughing It because while it was Sam who went on the trips, it was Mark Twain who was writing about it. Sam loved writing Tom Sawyer because it freed him from "Mark Twain", in whom he already felt trapped, and allowed him the freedom to talk about his own experiences through the eyes of a different character. Sam was tremendously anguished in writing Huck Finn because Huck's central dilemma is also Sam's: whether to be true to one's own self or to society. The dichotomy in The Prince and the Pauper also reflects Sam's personal struggle: the Prince is Mark Twain, while the Pauper is Sam; the two characters, though very different, even look the same. Even when Sam Clemens tries to break free of "Mark Twain" and write his own literature, writing a story about Joan of Arc, he is still trapped in publishing it under the Mark Twain name because the book won't sell otherwise. Sam Clemens constantly struggles; he buys admission to a world of great characters, popular stories, celebrity, and lucrative enterprise through the character Mark Twain, and then feels incredibly trapped by the constraints the persona offers.

Hoffman also speculates that everything that all of Sam's actions, too, related to this insecurity of personality. He writes that Sam visits Missouri on his second lecture tour just to find faces who know him as "Sam." Sam visits England not to go on a book tour,b but to escape his wife Livy just long enough to find out who "he" is. Throughout the book, Hoffman makes inferences that, taken individually, don't do enough to prove his thesis, but make a reasonable, sustainable argument when looked at in perspective.

This is a book with an interesting thesis: that everything Sam Clemens did in his life had the motivation of Sam wanting to "be somebody." There were two characters that Sam created well enough to be "somebody," and his own image had enough insecurity that he could comfortably inhabit these two personas. I follow Hoffman's argument every step of the way -- he gives sufficient examples through Twain's life and literature to support his thesis -- but I'm not sure I like the conclusion that he comes to. There's more to Sam Clemens than an individual struggling through a crisis of identity: through all of Sam's insecurities, I see someone marked with humor, compassion, and a unique sense of life.

America loved Mark Twain because he was larger than life: that's exactly what Sam Clemens wanted to be. As Hoffman says, many revered Mark Twain after his death because he was the "best" an American could be. Hoffman argues the opposite: Sam Clemens' entire life was horribly driven by insecurity. But in arguing this, Hoffman marginalizes "Mark Twain," claiming that he is someone completely different from Sam Clemens, but the two are so inextricably linked that while I follow Hoffman's argument, I think he's flawed from the start. Twain is neither larger-than-life, nor is Clemens haunted by insecurity; I think it's somewhere in-between. Yet, in short, I still really want to like this book. Through Sam's creation of Mark Twain, Hoffman challenges the reader to imagine who it is really writing the books and who the readers really are as they look at them.