Mark Twain

Twain’s self-styled “Aquarium Club” was a circle of adolescent girls he called his “angelfish,” whom he befriended and corresponded with during his old age. In Chernow’s biography, these relationships are presented with nuance: While Twain saw them as surrogate granddaughters offering him emotional solace after family tragedies, they also reveal his complicated efforts to recreate familial intimacy he had lost. The angelfish letters and encounters shed light on Twain’s loneliness, late-life need for adoration, and his self-mythologizing impulse to cast himself as a paternal, guiding figure even as it provoked controversy and discomfort from his own daughters.

The Ashcroft-Lyon Affair refers to Twain’s bitter conflict with Ralph Ashcroft and Isabel Lyon, his secretary and business manager (and briefly, in Isabel’s case, a close confidante). Chernow details how Twain came to view them as conspirators plotting to rob him, culminating in humiliating dismissals and the production of the accusatory Lyon-Ashcroft Manuscript. The episode reveals Twain’s paranoid late-life mindset, his financial vulnerability, and the way personal betrayals shaped his final years. It also highlights themes of trust, exploitation, and the blurred boundary between public image and private disarray amidst Twain’s declining health.