year

SAN DIEGO — Taylor Ward hit a grand slam to cap a six-run ninth inning, and the Angels beat the San Diego Padres 9-5 on Monday night.

The Angels rallied against Robert Suarez, who had converted 18 consecutive save opportunities — including 15 this season. Alek Jacob replaced Suarez and struck out Jorge Soler before Ward delivered.

Suarez (0-1) yielded a one-out single before walking four straight batters, forcing in two runs. The right-hander gave up just one run in his first 18 appearances this year.

Zach Neto hit a two-run homer for the Angels in the third. But San Diego scored three runs in the bottom half.

Jackson Merrill hit an RBI single, and left-hander Yusei Kikuchi committed a throwing error on Xander Bogaerts’ comebacker, bringing home two more runs. Gavin Sheets then singled to left but Matthew Lugo threw Bogaerts out at home.

San Diego star Fernando Tatis Jr. led off the fifth with his 10th homer, and a Bogaerts sacrifice fly made it 5-3 in the eighth.

Kikuchi gave up four runs — two earned — and seven hits in six innings. Brock Burke (4-0) pitched the eighth, and Kenley Jansen fanned two in a scoreless ninth.

King struck out eight in 5 2/3 innings. He was charged with three runs — two earned — and four hits.

It was San Diego’s first home game this month after a 6-3 trip.

Key moment

Ward drove a 2-2 pitch deep to left for his fifth career grand slam.

Key stat

Suarez had never walked more than two in a game and had just four in his first 17 2/3 innings.

Up next

José Soriano (2-4, 4.00 ERA) starts Tuesday for the Angels against Dylan Cease (1-2, 4.91 ERA).

When Morgan Wallen abruptly sauntered offstage during the curtain call that closed his most recent “Saturday Night Live” appearance in March, he quickly sparked online backlash and was accused of disrespecting the comedy institution. Now months since the viral moment, the country music star says he has no bad blood with “SNL.”

The Grammy-nominated “Last Night” singer publicly addressed his controversial exit for the first time in the latest episode of Caleb Pressley’s “Sundae Conversation,” published Sunday. During the nearly six-minute chat, Pressley joked with Wallen about home maintenance habits — like taking out the trash and cutting grass — to segue into the “SNL” matter. “Could you fix a TV if it was on ‘SNL’?” Pressley asked.

Wallen, chuckling, responded: “I could change it for sure.”

Earlier this year, “Saturday Night Live” tapped Oscar-winning “Anora” star Mikey Madison to host its March 29 episode and recruited Wallen to return as a musical guest. He made his “SNL” debut in December 2020, delayed by some pandemic-era controversy. During the March episode, Wallen performed a pair of tunes from his album “I’m the Problem,” due out this week.

In typical “SNL” fashion, the episode concluded with Madison and Wallen joining the show’s cast for the “goodnights” curtain call. Usually, both the host and musical guest hang around with the “SNL” stars as the credits roll, but Wallen seemingly had other places to be. After Wallen said goodbye to Madison, he walked in front of the camera toward the audience and left the stage. Shortly after, Wallen shared a photo from his private plane in his Instagram story. “Get me to God’s country,” he wrote over the image.

It’s worth noting that when Wallen debuted on “SNL” nearly five years ago, he appeared alongside host Jason Bateman in a sketch mocking his COVID-19 partying and stayed through the credits to mingle with the “SNL” cast.

The singer’s unexpected departure and social media post quickly generated headlines in March and became fodder for social media critics, some of whom saw Wallen’s “God’s country” line as a dig at New York. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, longtime “SNL” star Kenan Thompson acknowledged Wallen’s walk-off was a “spike in the norm” and a “pretty visible thing.” He also said he found the musician’s “God’s country” post odd.

“What are you trying to say? You trying to say that we are not in God’s country? We’re not all in God’s country?” Thompson told EW. “We’re not all under God’s umbrella? That’s not necessarily my favorite.”

The incident inspired reports about Wallen’s behavior before the live show, including that he did the same exit during rehearsals. The Hollywood Reporter said that Wallen passed on appearing in one of the episode’s sketches and Joe Jonas took the spot instead. “God’s country” and Wallen’s premature exit, of course, found their way back to “SNL,” which referenced the moment during the cold open and “Weekend Update” segments of its April 6 episode.

When Pressley asked “Did [‘SNL’ ] make you mad?” Wallen replied, “No, no.”

“I was just ready to go home,” he added. “Been there all week.”

“Sundae Conversation” touched on more that just one of Wallen’s recent controversies — the singer’s chair-throwing arrest last year also loomed over the chat, albeit more subtly. The “One Thing at a Time” and “Whiskey Glasses” singer, who was arrested in 2020 for public intoxication and faced scrutiny in 2021 for using a racial slur, was arrested in April 2024 on suspicion of hurling a chair from the top of a six-story Nashville bar. In December, the 31-year-old country singer entered a conditional plea in Davidson County Circuit Court to two misdemeanor charges of reckless endangerment. He was sentenced to seven days’ incarceration at a DUI Education Center, two years’ probation, a $350 fine and payment of court fees.

“I want you to name a thing that you can sit in that also flies through the air,” Pressley prompted his guest.

Wallen responded: “I mean there’s one obvious answer. Why do you want me to say that though? I mean, yeah, a jet.”

Pressley suggested there was another answer to his riddle and Wallen, finally catching his drift, answered: “A chair.”

Toward the end of the segment, Pressley also chatted with Wallen about motorcycles, new music and his Morgan Wallen Foundation. In one gag, Pressley suggested Wallen puts the “chair” in “charity.”

“I put the ‘-ity’ in ‘idiot,’ maybe,” Wallen responded.

Times assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla and former staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — American businesses that rely on Chinese goods reacted with muted relief Monday after the U.S. and China agreed to pause their exorbitant tariffs on each other’s products for 90 days.

Importers still face relatively high tariffs, however, as well as uncertainty over what will happen in the coming weeks and months. Many businesses delayed or canceled orders after President Trump last month put a 145% tariff on items made in China.

Now, they’re concerned a mad scramble to get goods onto ships will lead to bottlenecks and increased shipping costs. The temporary truce was announced as retailers and their suppliers are looking to finalize their plans and orders for the holiday shopping season.

“The timing couldn’t have been any worse with regard to placing orders, so turning on a dime to pick back up with customers and our factories will put us severely behind schedule,” said WS Game Company owner Jonathan Silva, whose Massachusetts business creates deluxe versions of Monopoly, Scrabble and other Hasbro board games.

Silva said the 30% tariff on Chinese imports still is a step in the right direction. He has nine containers of products waiting at factories in China and said he would work to get them exported at the lower rate.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the U.S. agreed to lower its 145% tariff rate on Chinese goods by 115 percentage points, while China agreed to lower its retaliatory 125% rate on U.S. goods by the same amount. The two sides plan to continue negotiations on a longer-term trade deal.

National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay said the move was a “critical first step to provide some short-term relief for retailers and other businesses that are in the midst of ordering merchandise for the winter holiday season.”

The news sent the stock market and the value of the dollar soaring, a lift that eluded business owners confronting another dizzying shift.

Marc Rosenberg, founder and CEO of Edge Desk in Deerfield, Ill., invested millions of dollars to develop a line of $1,000 ergonomic chairs but delayed production in China that was set to begin this month, hoping for a tariff reprieve.

Rosenberg said it was good U.S.-China trade talks were ongoing but that he thinks the 90-day window is “beyond dangerous” since shipping delays could result in his chairs still being en route when the temporary deal ends.

“There needs to be a plan in place that lasts a year or two so people can plan against it,” he said.

Jeremy Rice, the co-owner of a Lexington, Kentucky, home-décor shop that specializes in artificial flower arrangements, said the limited pause makes him unsure how to approach pricing. About 90% of the flowers House uses are made in China. He stocked up on inventory and then paused shipments in April.

“Our vendors are still kind of running around juggling, not knowing what they’re gonna do,” Rice said. “We ordered in what we could pre-tariff and so there’s stock here, but we’re getting to the point now where there’s things that are gone and we’re going to have to figure out how we’re gonna approach it.”

“There’s no relief,” he added. “It’s just kind of like you’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

Before Trump started the latest U.S. tariff battle with China, Miami-based game company All Things Equal was preparing to launch its first electronic board game. Founder Eric Poses said he spent two years developing “And the Good News Is,” a fill-in-the-blank game covering topics like politics and sports. He plowed $120,000 into research and development.

When the president in February added a 20% tariff on products made in China, Poses started removing unessential features such as embossed packaging. When the rate went up to 145%, he faced two options: leave the goods in China or send them to bonded warehouses, a storage method which allow importers to defer duty payments for up to five years.

Poses contacted his factories in China on Monday to arrange the deferred shipments, but with his games still subject to a 30% tariff, he said he would have to cut back on marketing to keep the electronic game priced at $29.99. With other businesses also in a rush to get their products, he said he is worried he won’t be able to his into shipping containers and that if he does, the cost will be much more expensive.

“It’s very hard to plan because if you want to go back to production in a couple of months, then you’re worried about what will the tariff rate be when it hits the U.S. ports after that 90-day period,” Poses said.

Jim Umlauf’s business, 4Knines, based in Oklahoma City, makes vehicle seat covers and cargo liners for dog owners and others. He imports raw materials such as fabric, coatings and components from China.

Umlauf said that even with a lower general tariff rate, it’s hard for small businesses to make a profit. He thinks the U.S. government should offer small business exclusions from the tariffs.

“I appreciate any progress being made on the tariff front, but unfortunately, we’re still far from a real solution — especially for small businesses like mine,” Umlauf said. “When tariffs exceed 50%, there’s virtually no profit left unless we dramatically raise prices — an option that risks alienating customers.”

Zou Guoqing, a Chinese exporter who supplies molds and parts to a snow-bike factory in Nebraska as well as fishing and hunting goods to a U.S. retailer in Texas, also thinks the remaining 30% tariff is too high to take comfort in.

With the possibility Washington and Beijing will negotiate over the 20% tariff Trump imposed due to what he described as China’s failure to stem the flow of fentanyl, Zou said he would wait until the end of May to decide when to resume shipments to the U.S.

Silva, of WS Game Company, said he planned to begin placing his holiday season orders this week but won’t be as bold as he might have been if the ultra-high tariff had been suspended for more than 90 day.

“We will order enough to get by and satisfy the demand we know will be there at the increased pricing needed, but until we get a solid foundation of a long-term agreement, the risks are still too high to be aggressive.”

Anderson and D’Innocenzio write for the Associated Press.

MaxPreps.com records date to the 2004-05 school year, documenting Reseda High’s baseball team posting one losing record after another. There was 1-18 in 2006, 3-11 in 2013, 3-13 last season.

With at least 20 years of losing records, the Regents have stunned the City Section this season, winning the Valley League with an 11-1 record and going 12-7 overall to earn a No. 13 seed in the City Section Division II playoffs that begin on Tuesday.

Moving from the Valley Mission League has given the Regents relief, but credit also goes to second-year coaches Daniel Swartz and Albert Silvera, former Beverly Hills High teammates from the 1980s who took over a losing program. Silvera was a chef, Swartz a sports producer and together, they’ve helped create a success story.

Teaching a baseball class in the fall got the team better prepared for the spring season, enabling 11 seniors to be part of a special year.

Senior Don Barajas leads the team in hitting with 33 hits, including 10 doubles. He also has struck out 59 in 31 innings.

Reseda used to be part of the West Valley League in the 1990s, having to face Chatsworth and El Camino Real.

…. Southern Section baseball and softball pairings will be announced on Monday.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

The decades-long controversy over the Los Angeles Zoo’s elephants is intensifying, even after officials announced that Billy and Tina will be moved to a zoo in Oklahoma where they will have more room to roam.

On Friday, an L.A. resident sued to halt the transfer of Billy and Tina to the Tulsa Zoo, arguing that they should instead be sent to an animal sanctuary.

The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction from the L.A. County Superior Court, includes a declaration from the singer Cher, who has been advocating on behalf of Billy and Tina for years.

“Billy and Tina have served their time in confinement,” Cher said in the declaration. “They deserve the chance to live out their lives in peace and dignity.”

Animal rights advocates have criticized the L.A. Zoo for decades for holding elephants in a relatively small enclosure, which they say causes serious health issues. Other celebrities who have rallied to the elephants’ cause include Lily Tomlin and the late Bob Barker.

Jewel, 61, and Shaunzi, 53, were euthanized in the last few years because of health issues that the zoo said were age-related, leaving only Billy and Tina, who live in separate enclosures in an elephant habitat of about 6.5 acres.

Zoo officials have long defended the care they provide to the elephants and did not cite any health issues in late April when they announced the transfer to the Tulsa Zoo, which recently expanded its elephant complex to include a 36,650-square-foot barn and a 10-acre wooded preserve. Billy and Tina will join five other Asian elephants there.

On Thursday before the City Council’s budget committee, L.A. Zoo Director and Chief Executive Denise Verret said she believed that Tulsa would provide “an environment where they can thrive,” citing the social benefits of living with other elephants.

The lawsuit, filed by John Kelly, an animal lover and longtime L.A. resident, names Verret as a defendant and outlines the health issues that can afflict elephants in captivity, including “zoochosis,” a mental illness caused by confinement.

Billy and Tina’s living conditions are “abysmal,” with little shade and hard-packed sand that has allegedly caused severe damage to their feet, according to the lawsuit.

“It doesn’t matter how big the zoo enclosure is, if it’s expanded or not, whether you call it a preserve or you call it an exhibit. It’s incredibly inhumane for them,” Melissa Lerner, an attorney representing Kelly, said in an interview after a news conference at the zoo’s entrance Sunday.

As far back as 2008, advocates have expressed anguish about Billy’s repetitive head-bobbing, which is a sign of brain damage, according to In Defense of Animals, which this year ranked the L.A. Zoo as No. 1 on its “10 Worst Zoos for Elephants” list for the second year in a row.

Billy is 40 years old, and Tina is 59. Billy came the L.A. Zoo when he was 4, in 1989, and Tina arrived at 44 in 2010, according to the zoo’s website. Asian elephants have a lifespan of roughly 60 years in the wild.

A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately provide a comment Sunday. A zoo representative , referred questions to the city attorney’s office; a spokesperson for that office said he could not comment on pending legislation.

L.A. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, a longtime advocate for the elephants, filed a motion last month seeking to pause their relocation until the City Council could review the possibility of sending them to a sanctuary.

At a budget committee hearing Monday, Blumenfield urged Verret to provide a report that includes the costs and benefits of the transfer to the Tulsa Zoo. He asked Verret to promise that the elephants will not be moved until the City Council could review the report and vote on it.

“What I can promise you is that I am always going to make decisions that are for the best interest of the animals at the zoo, including the elephants,” responded Verret, who was appointed by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2019.

Blumenfield again questioned Verret at the budget hearing Thursday, noting that the organization Last Chance for Animals has offered to pay to move Billy and Tina to a sanctuary.

Verret said no date has been set for the transfer and noted that the L.A. and Tulsa zoos have not signed a contract.

Kelly’s lawsuit also contends that the public and elected officials have been shut out of the decision-making. At both budget hearings, City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said that Verret has the power to move the elephants to Tulsa without the council’s approval.

On Sunday outside the L.A. Zoo, about 35 protesters, many of them from the group Los Angeles for Animals, held “Free Billy” signs and chanted “Mother’s Day is no excuse for animal abuse.” They urged visitors not to enter the zoo.

“Sweeping problems under the rug doesn’t get rid of problems,” said L.A. resident Elvia Sedano, who has been protesting at the zoo on behalf of the elephants nearly every Sunday for two years. “So we’ll be back. We’ll keep coming back until they do the right thing.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

Nareg Dekermenjian had Mother’s Day brunch with the Stanley Cup, which caused more than a little anxiety since no one was sure what hockey’s championship trophy liked to eat.

“I’m thinking all-meat diet for the Stanley Cup,” Dekermenjian said before sliding into a large corner booth at Stanley’s Restaurant (no relation to the Cup) in Sherman Oaks. “Anything less than that, I’m going to be very, very disappointed.”

As it turned out, the Cup was fasting so the plate in front of it remained empty. But then the trophy wasn’t the one being feted Sunday, Dekermenjian was. Last week he was named the winner of the NHL’s Future Goals Most Valuable Teacher Program, chosen from a field of hundreds of candidates from 31 of the league’s 32 cities.

For the fifth-grade teacher, who left a well-paying job as a financial advisor for a classroom four years ago, being honored by a visit from the Stanley Cup was a full-circle moment in several ways. For starters, it was an acknowledgment of the role hockey played in helping him adapt to his new country after his father, Edward, a jeweler in Lebanon who spoke only broken English, wagered everything when he left Beirut for the West Valley so his three children could have a chance at a better life.

Nareg Dekermenjian and his family eat lunch while the Stanley Cup sits in the middle of the table. Left to right are Edward, Ian, Zovig, Oliver and Nareg.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Dekermenjian, the youngest, was just 5 and he immediately had trouble fitting in.

“Making friends or having some kind of link with the kids my age, coming from a different country, that was really different,” he said. So one day his mother, Zovig, pushed him out the door to join some neighborhood kids in a street-hockey game.

“I’m glad I did,” Zovig said Sunday. The game, it turned out, would change everything.

“They gave me a roller-hockey stick and I just kind of fell in love with the sport immediately,” Dekermenjian said. “I’d never been really good at anything before, especially athletics. But I took to roller hockey.

“What it helped me do is create a lot of self-confidence and self-esteem, which is turn helped me in social situations.”

Dekermenjian went on to play at several levels, became a Kings season-ticket holder and now coaches his two sons on the concrete rink he built in their backyard. He’s also using hockey to break down social and cultural barriers at the Dixie Canyon Community Charter School in Sherman Oaks, where many of the nearly 700 students come from immigrant families new to the U.S.

Nareg Dekermenjian, a teacher in Sherman Oaks who won an NHL award, watches as Stanley Cup keeper Howie Borrow sets up the trophy.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“We have a big melting pot here,” assistant principal Maria Silva said.

But if all those children speak different languages, wear different clothes and pack different foods for lunch, they all understand sports. Even hockey.

“One hundred percent,” said Dekermenjian, 41. “That’s kind of why I do it.”

There are parallels between the challenges athletes face and the ones students face. The grit and perseverance needed to make it through an NHL season is just as necessary to make it through an academic year. There are goals and victories and defeats and teamwork, both on the ice and in the classroom.

“That connects a lot of the dots for these kids that aren’t used to hearing it that way,” Dekermenjian said. “I actually show clips and videos of hockey games when teams are down by multiple goals and they don’t give up and then they come back, they pull the goalie, and they take it.

“That’s, I think, a better way of starting a session. Having these kids look at something so incredible and then looking at themselves and thinking, ‘You know what? I can do this.’”

Nareg Dekermenjian takes a selfie with his son, Oliver, and the Stanley Cup during lunch at Stanley’s Restaurant.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Silva said few teachers at Dixie Canyon are requested by parents more frequently than Dekermenjian, whom she calls Mr. Deker. She often stop by his class herself just to listen.

“I’m just captivated by the stories that he’s sharing. And I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I want to be a kid and listen to him too. When they announced that he won [the NHL award,] I definitely felt they got it right.”

The stories don’t always work, however. And when they don’t Dekermenjian, like a good coach, changes his game plan — as he did in his first year as a teacher after welcoming a shy Ukrainian girl named Maria, who understood little English.

“We’re going over U.S. history and I’m like, ‘What does this child need to know about the Constitution?’ There’s way more important lessons we need to teach,” he said.

Maria loved art so Dekermenjian asked her to draw each day and then, after class, he and a translator would discuss the meaning behind what she had drawn. She was soon thriving in her new environment.

When kids struggle, Dekermenjian said, the problem often isn’t the student, but rather an engagement issue with the teacher.

“Educators, we need to kind of step it up and engage them in nontraditional ways,” he said.

“I’ve seen it work in the classroom. So I do it more and more and the feedback has been overwhelming. I’m creating a bunch of hockey fans and Kings fans in the process, so everyone wins, I guess.”

Speaking of the Kings, that’s the second reason Sunday’s meal was a reunion with the Stanley Cup. The first time he met the trophy was in 2014, when he posed in front of it with his wife, Lori, and then-infant son Ian, who actually owes his existence to the Cup.

During the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs, Lori came up to Dekermenjian and suggested that if the Kings won the Cup, they should have a baby. Dekermenjian, uncertain whether he was ready to be a dad but certain the Kings had no chance to win the NHL title, agreed — and a little more than a year later, Ian was born. They have since added a second son, Oliver.

“It’s a full-circle thing,” he said.

“I definitely feel like I found where I need to be in life. And I’m 100% certain that I was meant to teach.”

On Sunday the NHL agreed, giving him an afternoon with the Stanley Cup to prove it.

Mark Twain was America’s first celebrity, a multiplatform entertainer loved and recognized all over the world. Fans from America to Europe to Australia bought his books and flocked to his one-man shows, and his potent doses of humor and hard truth enthralled both the highborn and the humble. After he died, his work lived on through his novels, and his influence has endured — this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “James” by Percival Everett, reverses the roles of the main characters in Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” replacing the narration of the teenaged Huck with that of the slave Jim.

Ron Chernow writes books about men of great ambition ranging from President Ulysses S. Grant to financier J.P. Morgan — his biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the long-running Broadway musical — and is an expert chronicler of fame’s highs and lows. But in taking on Twain’s story, he signed on for a wild ride. Twain was both a brilliant writer who exposed America’s hypocrisies with humor and wit, and an angry man who savored revenge, nursed grudges and blamed God for the blows fate rained down on his head. “What a bottom of fury there is to your fun,” said Twain’s friend, the novelist William Dean Howells.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in the slaveholding community of Hannibal, Mo., a town he would immortalize in “Huckleberry Finn” and its prequel, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” The restless young man drifted from one job to another, then found his first calling as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, an experience that would inform Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and other books. The river gave him his pen name (the phrase “mark twain” indicated a safe water depth) and inflicted an early blow in the loss of his younger brother: encouraged by Twain, Henry Clemens signed on to a riverboat crew, then died when the boat exploded. Twain blamed himself.

Twain’s river idyll ended with the Civil War. Traffic dried up, and to escape conscription into the Confederate Army, Twain headed west with his brother Orion to the Nevada territory. He reveled in the rambunctious disorder of its mining towns, and as a young reporter there he uncorked his ebullient sense of humor. His literary career began in earnest when he moved to San Francisco, and helped by California writers such as Bret Harte, he went national when in 1865 a New York newspaper picked up his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Twain moved east, and his career took off like a rocket.

On a travel junket that inspired his first book, “Innocents Abroad,” Twain saw a portrait of his future wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon. He fell for her image and contrived to meet her, and despite Twain’s many eccentricities, her distinguished family accepted him. They married, and their life in Hartford, Conn., padded by Livy’s family wealth, was a gracious dream, as the greatest of Twain’s age — Grant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Keller — sought his company. But tragedy struck again: their first child, a son, died at 18 months.

The couple had three more children — daughters — and Livy’s seemingly bottomless wealth supported him. She edited his manuscripts, ran his household and smoothed his rough edges. But the couple’s Achilles’ heel was their shared taste for luxury. They routinely lived beyond their means, running up bills even as Twain, a reckless investor with terrible business sense, gambled with both his publishing earnings and her inheritance.

Throughout it all, he kept writing. The most enduring of Twain’s books is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” published Stateside in 1885 when Twain was 49, the story of a runaway boy and an escaped slave who flee down the Mississippi River. A sequel to Twain’s comic novel “Tom Sawyer,” it penetrated the dark heart of Hannibal’s savage treatment of Black people. Chernow writes that “if Tom Sawyer offered a sunlit view of antebellum Hannibal, in ‘Huck Finn’ Twain delved into the shadows. As he dredged up memories anew, he now perceived a town embroiled in slavery.”

Ron Chernow has previously authored biographies on historical figures including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton.

(Beowulf Sheehan)

“Huck Finn” was the apotheosis of Twain’s gift for truth-telling, as he exposed the sadistic oppression of Black people and made the slave Jim the hero. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the book has been banned for its use of a racial slur, but Chernow makes a strong case for the book’s significance, buttressed by “James” author Everett’s summation: “Anyone who wants to ban Huck Finn hasn’t read it.”

Twain’s book sales failed to balance the household budget, and the family had to move to Europe to curtail expenses, the beginning of years of exile. Their departure from America was the end of a dream and the beginning of a nightmare. Twain’s daughter Susy, who had remained in America, died of bacterial meningitis at age 24. Then Livy died. Her loss unleashed Twain’s anger at pitiless fate, and his relationships with his two surviving daughters became increasingly estranged. “Ah, this odious swindle, human life,” he swore, after his daughter Jean endured a major epileptic seizure.

“In most lives there arrives a mellowing, a lovely autumnal calm that overtakes even the stormiest personalities,” Chernow writes. “In Twain’s case, it was exactly the reverse: his emotions intensified, his indignation at injustice flared ever more hotly, his rage became almost rabid.” He continued to write and make appearances, drawing huge crowds, honing his image as a white-suited, cigar-chomping seer. But he also became self-indulgent and self-isolating, assisted by a poorly paid helper, Isabel Lyon, who took over most aspects of his life, an arrangement that was a prescription for disaster. His main companions were his “angelfish,” prepubescent girls he arranged to keep company with (Chernow makes a strong case that there was no sexual abuse in this arrangement), but his retreat into a second childhood couldn’t shield him from the final, catastrophic family loss that came shortly before his own death.

The downward trajectory of Twain’s life shadows his story in elements of Greek tragedy. Twain was a cauldron of creativity and often courage, speaking for Black equality and the suffrage movement, and against anti-Chinese harassment, colonialism and kings. But in his final years, he allowed grief and bitterness to swamp his life, and one wonders at how such a brilliant man could have such little understanding of himself. At 1,200 pages, this is not a book for the casual reader, and Chernow never quite gets to the core of the contradictions in Twain’s conflicted soul. But he tells the whole story, in all its glory and sorrow.

“Mark Twain” is a masterful exploration of the magnificent highs and unutterable lows of an American literary genius. Twain himself once said that “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But this one feels like the truth of one man’s star-crossed life.

Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.