Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain

Hal Holbrook

Macmillan + ORM, Sep 13, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 477 pages

In Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain, the beloved stage, film, and television actor Hal Holbrook presents an affecting memoir about his struggle to discover his true self, even as he learned to transform himself onstage.

Abandoned by his mother and father when he was two, Holbrook and his two sisters commenced separate journeys of survival. Raised by his powerful grandfather, who died when Holbrook was twelve, he spent his childhood at boarding schools, visiting his father in an insane asylum and hoping his mother would suddenly surface in Hollywood.

As World War II engulfed Europe, Holbrook began acting almost by accident. Through war, marriage, and the work of honing his craft, his fear of insanity and his fearlessness in the face of risk were channeled into discovering that the riskiest path of all—success as an actor—would be his birthright. The climb up that forbidding mountain was a lonely one. And how he achieved it—the cost to his wife and children and to his own conscience—is the dark side of the fame he would eventually earn by portraying the man his career would forever be most closely associated with: Mark Twain.

“If I were to conjure an image of an individual who best fits the phrase ‘a real American,’ it would be Hal Holbrook. This book shows him as a complete person. You will be compelled by the wit and wisdom of this beautifully composed story of self-determination and survival.”—Robert Redford

Contents

• 1: 3
• 2: 10
• 3: 16
• 4: 26
• 5: 35
• 6: 42
• 7: 54
• 8: 63
• 9: 78
• 10: 89
• 11: 104
• 12: 117
• 13: 135
• 14: 148
• 15: 168
• 16: 185
• 17: 199
• 18: 217
• 19: 228
• 20: 243
• 21: 261
• 22: 273
• 23: 287
• 24: 297
• 25: 317
• 26: 328
• 27: 341
• 28: 355
• 29: 373
• 30: 387
• 31: 400
• 32: 412
• 33: 428
• 34: 440
• 35: 450
• Epilogue: 465
• Acknowledgments: 467

About the author

Hal Holbrook (1925-2021) was an award-winning, celebrated film, television, and stage actor. His one-man play Mark Twain Tonight! featured Holbrook portraying the famous author in a touring production starting in 1959 that played across the United States and in Europe. He won a Tony Award for his performance during the show’s Broadway run in 1966, and continued playing Twain on tours for more than sixty years.

The recipient of five prime-time Emmy Awards for acting, including as Abraham Lincoln in Sandberg’s Lincoln mini-series, he received an Academy Award-nomination for his role in Into the Wild. Holbrook also appeared in such films as All the President’s Men, Midway, Magnum Force, Wall Street, The Firm, and Lincoln. He had a recurring role on the sitcom Evening Shade, and appeared on such television shows as Hawaii Five-0, Grey’s Anatomy, Sons of Anarchy, and The Sopranos.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain
• Author: Hal Holbrook
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: Macmillan + ORM, 2011
• ISBN: 1429969016, 9781429969017
• Length: 477 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts; Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs