Mark Twain, the highest-paid writer in America in 1894, was also one of the nation’s worst investors. “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” he wrote. “When he can’t afford it and when he can.” After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars back when a beer cost a nickel, he found himself neck-deep in debt. His heiress wife, Livy, took the setback hard. She wrote, “I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace.” Twain vowed to Livy he would pay back every penny. So, just when he imagined he would be settling into literary lionhood, he forced himself to mount the “platform” again. He did what no author had ever done, he embarked on a round-the-world stand-up comedy tour. Richard Zacks’ book “Chasing the Last Laugh,” chronicles this poignant chapter in Mark Twain’s life.
Richard Zacks is the bestselling author of Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York; Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805; Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd; History Laid Bare; and An Underground Education. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Finnish. He attended the University of Michigan, Universita Italiana per Stranieri in Perugia, and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. After a few years of newspaper work, he turned to book writing. He is dedicated to who, what, where and when, and occasionally why. Born in Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in New York City.
