Review of Twice-Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography
By Hester Kaplan | Catapult, 2025, $27
Hester Kaplan’s book is a generic puzzler: should it be shelved with biography, literary criticism, or autobiography? It’s about half of each. But it’s also a life-and-times account with wedges of social history. If it eludes categories, it is because the author’s motives are complex. She carefully unravels the tangle of talent, research, guilt, grit, and circumstance that resulted in Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966) by her father, Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. She also presents a privileged point of view on his education, family, residences, finances, Jewishness, and his and his novelist wife Anne Bernays’s place at the top of the artistic and professional community of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were also presences on Cape Cod, and spent summers in Truro for decades. Their daughter’s book focuses on his profound identification with Mark Twain, but also depicts his successful marriage to a successful novelist, his oblique relationships with his three daughters (same number as Twain), and his agonizing and recalcitrant eczema that is the sign and symbol of the seven-year struggle to write his canonical biography, winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer. Undergirding everything is her scrupulous depiction of her father’s unabated ambition, one which mirrors Twain’s, and also her own. His ambition was to reanimate Twain, to become his incarnation. It took a toll. Hester states that he was more “fully engaged” with Twain’s daughters than he was with his own.