For more than three decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Ron Chernow has marshaled deft prose, meticulous research and a keen sense of irony to bring leading American figures to life — most famously revealing the wunderkind Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton as such a colorful character that he became the toast of Broadway.

Now, he’s cast his sharp eye on one of America’s most original characters, an irrepressible pundit, madcap businessman and eccentric lover of hoaxes and hijinks, who also happens to be the father of American humor. In Mark Twain, Chernow introduces a boy who left school after the fifth grade and became a printer, steamboat pilot and reckless investor whose brash humor and talent for tall tales gained him national attention . . . and legendary status in the American literary canon.

Chernow returns to The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center to discuss this unlikely literary giant whose career and writings reflect an America wracked by the chaotic collision of western expansion, slavery and nascent industrialization.

The best-selling author of biographies of the Warburgs, the Morgans, John D. Rockefeller, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, Ron Chernow has received the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His biography of the first US secretary of the treasury was adapted into the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton.