Mark Twain

About Mark Twain’s life and work.

                    His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is better known by his pen name Mark Twain. One of the most important figures in American literary history it holds a unique position in American literature. He was not only a great writer, he was also a famous  humorist, a journalist who satirized the hypocrisy of man and society, and a novelist who used laughter to fight against the tyrannies that sun to take away man’s freedom.

                     He was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835.  He was the son of storekeeper-lawyer father. His father’s name was John Marshal Clemens. His mother’s name was Jane Lampton Clemens. He also had two brothers: Orion – he was the eldest and Genry – he was the youngest. Samuel Clemens was  raised in Hannibal, Missouri, where his family had settled when he was 4 years old. Sam never finished elementary school because of his father’s death. John Clemens died when Sam was about 12 years old. But Samuel got his education chiefly in the school of experience and from his keen observation of people and events common to the western  bank of the Mississippi River.

                      Young Sam’s favourite pastime was watching the mighty paddle wheel steamboats as they made their way up and   down the river. Nearly every time a steamboat docked at Hannibal, Samuel Clemens was there to greet it, to look, and to listen as for trappers, Southern gentlemen, salesmen from the East, and  ladies in fine clothes come down the gangpark.

                      In 1847, the death of Sam’s father, brought an end to his carefree days.  He had to go to work at the age of 12 as a printer’s apprentice. In three years he went to work as a printer for his brother Orion, publisher of the Hannibal Journal. Samuel worked for his brother Orion as foreman, sub-editor,  a feature writer and doubtlessly learned a good deal about writing. A worker from Scotland (his name was Machfarlane) made Sam be interested in literature. He read a lot.

                     At about the age of 16, he began to publish some of his own writing in the Hannibal Journal – humorous poems, joking commentaries on the news, and satirical observations of fellow town’s people.

                     When he was 17, Samuel left Hannibal and wandered east-ward as far as New York. Along the way he worked as a printer in several cities and wrote often to Orion, who printed his letters in a special  column in the newspaper. After he returned to the West, Samuel  Langhorne Clemens again went to work for Orion, who had moved to the State of Iowa.

                       At the age of 21, Samuel returned to the river to realize an old ambition, he wanted to be   a  Mississippi River steamboat pilot. And in 1857, after 18 months’ apprenticeship as pilot of the steamboat, which was called  “PAUL JONES”, Samuel Langhorne Clemens earned his own steamboat pilot’s license. For the next four years he steamed up and down the Mississippi and got to know the name and position of every feature of the river. He described this experience in “Life at the Mississippi”.

In June, 1858 Sam knew about his young brother’s death.

                        In 1861, when the Civil War between the Southern or Confederate States of America and the Northern part of America began and disrupted Mississippi River traffic, Samuel Clemens’ career as a steamboat pilot ended. But at the same time his career as Mark Twain, the writer, was about to  begin. In the same year Samuel and Orion boarded  an overland stagecoach for a 1,700-mile Journey from St Joseph Missouri to Carson Cites, Nevada. Orion had been appointed territory secretary for Nevada and had asked Samuel to accompany him to his new job.

                         Samuel quickly adjusted to the rugged life of a frontier mining town but soon succumbed to silver mining fever. During the long months of his search for easy wealth, Samuel heard and remembered many miners’ years which he was later to utilize in his writings.

                          Nevada’s leading frontier newspaper, it was called the  Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, printed several of Samuel’s colourful and humorous sketches of  frontier life and finally offered him a job as an editor. Within two years he was known throughout the western frontier as the “ Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope ”.

                            In 1863, he assumed the name Mark Twain, a term he remembered from his days on the steamboat meaning “ a depth of two fathoms – clear passage “. In becoming Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens became a new personality. Mark Twain – “mark 2” means an enough deep for ship’s sailing.

                             By December 1864, Mark Twain was forced to leave Virginia City after he and rival newspaper tried to settle a difference  of opinion by fighting a duel. He went from Virginia City to San Francisco, a city shill caught up in the excitement of gold fever. While there he published a miner’s yarn, “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country “. The tale was an immediate success and it made the name of Mark Twain famous all over the USA.

                         In 1865, after spending five months in the Sandwich Islands – as Hawaii was then called – Twain returned to the continent and launched a public lecture tour about his experience. He was an overnight success, and in 1867, with the money he had earned from lecturing, he was able to go abroad for the last time, visiting France, Italy, Spain and Palestine. Newspaper accounts of his trip were later revised and published as “ The Innocents Abroad ” (1969).

                            It was in Hartford, in the years between 1871 and 1891, that Twain wrote his two masterpieces: “ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and  “The Adventures of   Huckleberry Finn” (1884). These novels – together with other Twain writting of the period: “A Tramp abroad” – 1886, “The Prince and the Pauper” – 1882, “Life on the Mississippi” – 1883, and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – 1889, are felt by many critics to mark the beginning of modern American literature.

                            Twain’s greatest fame and his importance in American letters rest largely on his two best-known novels: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. The latter is generally considered to be his greatest novels are filled with concrete details which he had observed, remembered fully, and set down. Idyllic in nature, Huckleberry Finn presents a picture of Twain’s boyhood, yet the story of Huck and Jim has dark overtones. The world that they see is not a hoped for of peace and beauty. It is a world of fear and cruelty and violence and injustice in which the innocence of Huck and Jim provides a sharp contrast between. What is good in the natural boy or man and what has gone wrong which adult society.

                        All of Twain’s books are modeled from the days of his past; in most of them he is the hero. “Roughing It” and “Life on the Mississippi” are almost completely autobiographical; “ The Innocents Abroad” caricaturizes the gullible American tourist; “The Prince and the Pauper” expresses Twain’s hatred of injustice and of the need for mercy.

                        As he grew older, Twain grew increasingly depressed and disillusioned by what called “Its damned human race”, and her later works such as “Pudd’nhead Wilson” (1899) and “The Mysterious Stranger” ( published posthumously in 1916) mirror his growing bitterness. “The Mysterious Strange”, his last book, is an allegory that suggests that life is in reality only a dream.

                          Twain’s success as an author, public speaker, husband and father, was not reflected in his choice of business investments, and at the all of 55, he found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. In June 1891, with funds he had manages to scrape to gather, he left Hartford and took his family to Europe where living was cheaper. A gypsy life followed as the family moved from city to city while wrote ceaselessly and ever gave lectures to learn enough money to overcome his financial losses. His efforts were fruitless, however, and in April 1894, he declared bankruptcy with debts totaling $ 94,000. Nevertheless, by 1898, true to his Midwest code of ethics Twain had paid off all his obligations, although during those 4 difficult intervening years he had endured the added burden of ill health and the death of his daughter, Suzy.            

  As the height of his fame, Twain and his family returned to the USA after nine years of self imposed exile. His popularity was so great that he was deluged with honours and invitation to lecture, and   by the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of the best known public figures in the USA, and world- famous as well.

                         The joy of his success, however, was dulled by two personal losses: the death of his wife in 1904 and his young daughter Jean, five years later (Suzy died at the age of 25). Twain had 4 children: 3 daughters and a son, Lengdone, who died in 1872 at the age of 2. In spite of his grief, Twain continued to amuse the American public with a seemingly inexhaustible store  of wit and humour. For example, on reaching the age of 70, he said: “Seventy! I am old. I recognize it, but I don’t realize it”.                                                              

                   On April 21, 1910, while Halley’s Comet ( comet that orbits the sun about every 76 years and named after Edmond Halley, who calculated its orbit), which has ushered in his birth 74 years earlier, flashed across the night sky, Samuel Langhorne Clemens died. Shortly before his death, he had remarked to his friend: “I came in with Harlley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming againe next year, and I expect to go out with it”.

                   Mark Twain left his mark upon American literature. The stories he told still delight millions of people around the world. What he wrote was full of the gusto of the west and the colourful life he had known intimately and recorded as a student of human nature and the common life. What he left as an added legacy is the inspiration of a man, who rose above setbacks and tragedy to carry on, sustained by his indomitable spirit of creativity.

Some more facts:

We know that Twain depicts much of his early life in the book “Life on the Mississippi”. As Albert Bigelow Paine writes: “In “Life on the Mississippi” we have (Twain’s) story of how he met Horace Bixby and decided to become a pilot instead of a South American adventurer jauntily setting himself the stupendous task of learning the 12 hundred  miles of the Mississippi River between St Louis and New Orleans of knowing it as exactly and as unfailingly even in the dark, as one knows the way to his own features. It seems incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later years – dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details that he could have  acquired so vast a store of minute facts as  were required by that task. Yet within 18 months he had become not only a pilot, but one of the best and most careful pilots on the river, entrusted with some of the largest and most valuable steamers. He continued in that profession for 2 and a half years longer, and during that time met with no disaster that cost his owners a single dollar for damage”.