Five 2025 discoveries.

1. Ken Burns, Mark Twain, Percival Everett

This has been a Ken Burns year for me. I watched his Country series, and wrote about its beauty and brilliance here on A Fan’s Notes; but I also loved Prohibition, one of the maddest, saddest and funniest experiments ever carried out by a democracy, and Hemingway, and, just the other day, the two-part, 212-minute Mark Twain. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never read Huckleberry Finn, or never want to think about it again, because Clemens’ life story is incredible. You probably know the basics: a small town in Missouri, printer and typesetter, riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, traveller, author of perhaps the first truly American novel, most famous writer in the world, fervent supporter of emancipation and women’s suffrage, and, finally, woeful speculator, who lost just about everything he’d ever earned. He also lost his brother in a riverboat accident when he was young, then two daughters and his beloved wife.

Burns has a way of making you feel the lives of his subjects, and his depth of feeling for Clemens’ tragedies means that Mark Twain has the power to reduce you to mush, but the triumphs are properly enthralling, and Clemens desire to travel as far away from Hannibal, Missouri as he could get is bewilderingly modern: he sailed to Palestine in 1867. Burns’ film is now a quarter of a century old, which means it. doesn’t have much to say on the subject of Huckleberry Finn being removed from school curricula in the twenty-first century; on the other hand, Arthur Miller is one of the interviewees, which is pretty cool

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