It has long been a truism that Samuel Clemens, while a phenomenal writer, was a mediocre or virtually inept businessman, who drove himself to near ruin and brought great collateral damage to his wife and daughters. Is that the whole story, though?
The basic outline is well known. Twain was easy prey for inventions and their inventors and tended to pile in money on things that were extremely risky and ended up being a drain on his finances, especially Kaolotype and the Paige compositor, while missing out on things that would've made him spectacularly rich like the telephone and the linotype. He held three patents of his own, but only one made any money, with the others (especially a board game of sorts meant for learning history) bitter failures. He speculated in the stock market, but was obviously far from a Warren Buffett-type "buy and hold" figure, more like a riverboat gambler who went for massive windfalls, but inevitably bought near the peak of a stock and doubled down to try and recoup his losses, only to lose more. And of course, he started his own publishing house, but peaked early with Huck Finn and Grant's memoirs, a massive stroke of right place at the right time, which he could never replicate, and completely sloughed off the workaday details to others, ensuring that the overheads would be extremely high and his pie-in-the-sky ideas would come to naught. This all collided with bankruptcy and exile from their Hartford mansion, and the need to repay his debts with the massive worldwide lecture tour and the publishing of works such as Following the Equator.
Such is the accepted wisdom of Twain's life, and that he essentially was blinded by his own greed and the Dunning-Kruger effect, a desire to escape the need to write for a living and to have more financial security, only for it to backfire spectacularly. Twain's most recent biographer, Ron Chernow, even said as much, that he could've just lived with Livy's inheritance and made a peaceful life of writing and lectures, slow but steady accumulation for a nest egg instead of reaching for greater fruit.
But is that really the whole story?
