mark twain biography wikipedia

(1835-1910)

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom — all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of income — he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier , which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union , a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War , which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States . Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise . He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

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Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn ," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper , a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi , an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant , who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson , a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc . Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale . Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Mark Twain
• Birth Year: 1835
• Birth date: November 30, 1835
• Birth State: Missouri
• Birth City: Florida
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Twain, the writer, adventurer and wily social critic born Samuel Clemens, wrote the novels 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Death Year: 1910
• Death date: April 21, 1910
• Death State: Connecticut
• Death City: Redding
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Twain Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/mark-twain
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.
• Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.
• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
• I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.
• In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
• 'Classic'—a book which people praise and don't read.
• When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
• We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.
• Be good and you will be lonesome.

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A Life Lived in a Rapidly Changing World: Samuel L. Clemens‚ 1835-1910

As twain’s books provide insight into the past‚ the events of his personal life further demonstrate his role as an eyewitness to history..

During his lifetime‚ Sam Clemens watched a young United States evolve from a nation torn apart by internal conflicts to one of international power. He experienced America’s vast growth and change – from westward expansion to industrialization‚ the end of slavery‚ advancements in technology‚ big government and foreign wars. And along the way‚ he often had something to say about the changes happening in his country.

The Early Years

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30‚ 1835 in Florida‚ Missouri‚ the sixth of seven children. At age 4‚ Sam and his family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal‚ Missouri‚ on the banks of the Mississippi River. Missouri‚ at the time‚ was a fairly new state (it had gained statehood in 1821) and made up part of the country’s western border. It was also a state that took part in slavery. Sam’s father owned one enslaved person, and his uncle owned several. In fact‚ it was on his uncle’s farm that Sam spent many boyhood summers playing in the enslaved people’s quarters‚ listening to tall tales and the spirituals that he would enjoy throughout his life.

In 1847‚ when Sam was 11‚ his father died. Shortly thereafter he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. His job was to arrange the type for each of the newspaper’s stories‚ allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work.

Twain’s Young Adult Life

At 18‚ Sam headed east to New York City and Philadelphia‚ where he worked on several different newspapers and found some success at writing articles. By 1857‚ he had returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861‚ however‚ all traffic along the river came to a halt‚ as did Sam’s pilot career. Inspired by the times‚ Sam joined up with a volunteer Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers‚ but he quit after just two weeks.

In search of a new career‚ Sam headed west in July 1861‚ at the invitation of his brother‚ Orion‚ who had just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Lured by the infectious hope of striking it rich in Nevada’s silver rush‚ Sam traveled across the open frontier from Missouri to Nevada by stagecoach. Along the journey Sam encountered Native American tribes for the first time, along with a variety of unique characters‚ mishaps, and disappointments. These events would find a way into his short stories and books‚ particularly   Roughing It .

After failing as a silver prospector‚ Sam began writing for the Territorial Enterprise‚ a Virginia City‚ Nevada newspaper where he used‚ for the first time‚ his pen name‚ Mark Twain. Seeking change, by 1864 Sam headed for San Francisco where he continued to write for local papers.

In 1865 Sam’s first “big break” came with the publication of his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog ” in papers across the country. A year later Sam was hired by the Sacramento Union to visit and report on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His writings were so popular that‚ upon his return‚ he embarked upon his first lecture tour‚ which established him as a successful stage performer.

Hired by the Alta California to continue his travel writing from the east‚ Sam arrived in New York City in 1867. He quickly signed up for a steamship tour of Europe and the “Holy Land.” His travel letters‚ full of vivid descriptions and tongue-in-cheek observations‚ met with such audience approval that they were later reworked into his first book‚  The Innocents Abroad , published in 1869. It was also on this trip that Clemens met his future brother-in-law‚ Charles Langdon. Langdon reportedly showed Sam a picture of his sister‚  Olivia ‚ and Sam fell in love at first sight.

Twain Starts a Family and Moves to Hartford

After courting for two years‚ Sam Clemens and Olivia (Livy) Langdon were married in 1870. They settled in Buffalo‚ New York‚ where Sam had become a partner‚ editor, and writer for the daily newspaper the  Buffalo Express . While they were living in Buffalo‚ their first child‚ Langdon Clemens‚ was born.

In 1871 Sam moved his family to Hartford‚ Connecticut‚ a city he had come to love while visiting his publisher there and where he had made friends. Livy also had family connections to the city. For the first few years the Clemenses rented a house in the heart of Nook Farm‚ a residential area that was home to numerous writers‚ publishers, and other prominent figures. In 1872 Sam’s recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book  Roughing It . That same year the Clemenses’ first daughter Susy was born‚ but their son‚ Langdon‚ died at age two from diphtheria.

In 1873 Sam’s focus turned toward social criticism. He and Hartford Courant publisher Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote  The Gilded Age ‚ a novel that attacked political corruption‚ big business, and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era. Ironically‚ a year after its publication‚ the Clemenses’ elaborate 25-room house on Farmington Avenue‚ which had cost the then-huge sum of $40‚000-$45‚000‚ was completed.

Twain Writes his Most Famous Books While Living in Hartford

For the next 17 years (1874-1891)‚ Sam‚ Livy, and their three daughters (Clara was born in 1874 and Jean in 1880) lived in the Hartford home. During those years Sam completed some of his most famous books‚ often finding a summer refuge for uninterrupted work at his sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira‚ New York. Novels such as  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) and  Life on the Mississippi (1883) captured both his Missouri memories and depictions of the American scene. Yet his social commentary continued.  The Prince and the Pauper  (1881) explored class relations, as does  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  (1889), which‚ going a step further‚ criticized oppression in general while examining the period’s explosion of new technologies. And‚ in perhaps his most famous work‚  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1884)‚ Clemens‚ by the way he attacked the institution of slavery‚ railed against the failures of Reconstruction and the continued poor treatment of African Americans in his own time.

Huckleberry Finn  was also the first book published by Sam’s own publishing company‚ The Charles L. Webster Company. In an attempt to gain control over publication as well as to make substantial profits‚ Sam created the company in 1884. A year later he contracted with Ulysses S. Grant to publish Grant’s memoirs; the two-volume set provided large royalties for Grant’s widow and was a financial success for the publisher as well.

Twain’s Financial Ruin and Subsequent Travels

Although Sam enjoyed financial success during his Hartford years‚ he continually made bad investments in new inventions‚ which eventually brought him to bankruptcy. In an effort to economize and pay back his debts‚ Sam and Livy moved their family to Europe in 1891. When his publishing company failed in 1894‚ Sam was forced to set out on a worldwide lecture tour to earn money. In 1896 tragedy struck when Susy Clemens‚ at age 24‚ died from meningitis while on a visit to the Hartford home. Unable to bear being in the place of her death‚ the Clemenses never returned to Hartford to live.

From 1891 until 1900‚ Sam and his family traveled throughout the world. During those years Sam witnessed the increasing exploitation of weaker governments by European powers‚ which he described in his book  Following the Equator  (1897). The Boer War in South Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China fueled his growing anger toward imperialistic countries and their actions. With the Spanish-American and Philippine wars in 1898‚ Sam’s wrath was redirected toward the American government. When he returned to the United States in 1900‚ his finances restored‚ Sam readily declared himself an anti-imperialist and‚ from 1901 until his death‚ served as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League.

Twain’s Darkest Times and Late Life

In these later years‚ Sam’s writings turned dark. They began to focus on human greed and cruelty and questioned the humanity of the human race. His public speeches followed suit and included a harshly sarcastic public introduction of Winston Churchill in 1900. Even though Sam’s lecture tour had managed to get him out of debt‚ his anti-government writings and speeches threatened his livelihood once again. As Sam was labeled by some as a traitor‚ several of his works were never published during his lifetime, either because magazines would not accept them or because of his own personal fear that his marketable reputation would be ruined.

In 1903‚ after living in New York City for three years‚ Livy became ill, and Sam and his wife returned to Italy, where she died a year later. After her death‚ Sam lived in New York until 1908, when he moved into his last house‚ “Stormfield,” in Redding‚ Connecticut. In 1909 his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean‚ the youngest daughter‚ died from an epileptic seizure. Four months later, on April 21‚ 1910‚ Sam Clemens died at age 74.

Like any good journalist‚ Sam Clemens‚ a.k.a. Mark Twain‚ spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the strengths and weaknesses of a rapidly changing world. By examining his life and his works‚ we can read into the past – piecing together various events of the era and the responses to them. We can delve into the American mindset of the late nineteenth century and make our own observations of history‚ discover new connections‚ create new inferences and gain better insights into the time period and the people who lived in it. As Sam once wrote‚ “Supposing is good‚ but finding out is better.”

Mark Twain: His Life and His Humor

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Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens Nov. 30, 1835 in the small town of Florida, MO, and raised in Hannibal, became one of the greatest American authors of all time. Known for his sharp wit and pithy commentary on society, politics, and the human condition, his many essays and novels, including the American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , are a testament to his intelligence and insight. Using humor and satire to soften the edges of his keen observations and critiques, he revealed in his writing some of the injustices and absurdities of society and human existence, his own included. He was a humorist, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, lecturer, iconic celebrity (who always wore white at his lectures), political satirist, and social progressive .

He died on April 21, 1910 when Halley’s Comet was again visible in the night sky, as lore would have it, just as it had been when he was born 75 years earlier. Wryly and presciently, Twain had said, “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”  Twain died of a heart attack one day after the Comet appeared its brightest in 1910.

A complex, idiosyncratic person, he never liked to be introduced by someone else when lecturing, preferring instead to introduce himself as he did when beginning the following lecture, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” in 1866:

“Ladies and gentlemen: The next lecture in this course will be delivered this evening, by Samuel L. Clemens, a gentleman whose high character and unimpeachable integrity are only equalled by his comeliness of person and grace of manner. And I am the man! I was obliged to excuse the chairman from introducing me, because he never compliments anybody and I knew I could do it just as well.”

Twain was  a complicated mixture of southern boy and western ruffian striving to fit into elite Yankee culture. He wrote in his speech, Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,1881 :

“I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.”

Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri had a lasting influence on Twain, and working as a steamboat captain for several years before the Civil War was one of his greatest pleasures. While riding the steamboat he would observe the many passengers, learning much about their character and affect. His time working as a miner and a journalist in Nevada and California during the 1860s introduced him to the rough and tumble ways of the west, which is where, Feb. 3, 1863, he first used the pen name, Mark Twain, when writing one of his humorous essays for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in Nevada.

Mark Twain was a riverboat term that means two fathoms, the point at which it is safe for the boat to navigate the waters. It seems that when Samuel Clemens adopted this pen name he also adopted another persona - a persona that represented the outspoken commoner, poking fun at the aristocrats in power, while Samuel Clemens, himself, strove to be one of them.

Twain got his first big break as a writer in 1865 with an article about life in a mining camp, called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog , also called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County . It was very favorably received and printed in newspapers and magazines all over the country. From there he received other jobs, sent to Hawaii, and then to Europe and the Holy Land as a travel writer. Out of these travels he wrote the book, The Innocents Abroad , in 1869, which became a bestseller. His books and essays were generally so well-regarded that he started lecturing and promoting them, becoming popular both as a writer and a speaker.

When he married Olivia Langdon in 1870, he married into a wealthy family from Elmira, New York and moved east to Buffalo, NY and then to Hartford, CT where he collaborated with the Hartford Courant Publisher to co-write The Gilded Age, a satirical novel about greed and corruption among the wealthy after the Civil War. Ironically, this was also the society to which he aspired and gained entry. But Twain had his share of losses, too - loss of fortune investing in failed inventions (and failing to invest in successful ones such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone ), and the deaths of people he loved, such as his younger brother in a riverboat accident, for which he felt responsible, and several of his children and his beloved wife.

Although Twain survived, thrived, and made a living out of humor, his humor was borne out of sorrow, a complicated view of life, an understanding of life’s contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities.  As he once said, “ There is no laughter in heaven .” 

Mark Twain’s style of humor was wry, pointed, memorable, and delivered in a slow drawl. Twain’s humor carried on the tradition of humor of the Southwest, consisting of tall tales, myths, and frontier sketches, informed by his experiences growing up in Hannibal, MO, as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and as a gold miner and journalist in Nevada and California.

In 1863 Mark Twain attended in Nevada the lecture of Artemus Ward (pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne,1834-1867), one of America’s best-known humorists of the 19th century. They became friends, and Twain learned much from him about how to make people laugh. Twain believed that how a story was told was what made it funny  - repetition, pauses, and an air of naivety.

In his essay How to Tell a Story Twain says, “There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one.” He describes what makes a story funny, and what distinguishes the American story from that of the English or French; namely that the American story is humorous, the English is comic, and the French is witty.

He explains how they differ:

“The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is strictly a work of art, — high and delicate art, — and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story —- understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print — was created in America, and has remained at home.”

Other important characteristics of a good humorous story, according to Twain, include the following:

• A humorous story is told gravely, as though there is nothing funny about it.
• The story is told wanderingly and the point is “slurred.”
• A “studied remark” is made as if without even knowing it, “as if one were thinking aloud.”
• The pause: “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less—or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended—and then you can't surprise them, of course.”

Twain believed in telling a story in an understated way, almost as if he was letting his audience in on a secret. He cites a story, The Wounded Soldier , as an example and to explain the difference in the different manners of storytelling, explaining that:

 “The American would conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it…. the American tells it in a ‘rambling and disjointed’ fashion and pretends that he does not know that it is funny at all,” whereas “The European ‘tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.” ….”All of which,” Mark Twain sadly comments, “is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.”

Twain’s folksy, irreverent, understated style of humor, use of vernacular language, and seemingly forgetful rambling prose and strategic pauses drew his audience in, making them seem smarter than he. His intelligent satirical wit, impeccable timing, and ability to subtly poke fun at both himself and the elite made him accessible to a wide audience, and made him one of the most successful comedians of his time and one that has had a lasting influence on future comics and humorists.

Humor was absolutely essential to Mark Twain, helping him navigate life just as he learned to navigate the Mississippi when a young man, reading the depths and nuances of the human condition like he learned to see the subtleties and complexities of the river beneath its surface. He learned to create humor out of confusion and absurdity, bringing laughter into the lives of others as well. He once said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

MARK TWAIN PRIZE

Twain was much admired during his lifetime and recognized as an American icon. A  prize created in his honor, The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the nation’s top comedy honor, has been given annually since 1998 to “people who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th century novelist and essayist best known as Mark Twain.” Previous recipients of the prize have included some of the most notable humorists of our time. The 2017 prizewinner is David Letterman, who according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times writer , “Like Mark Twain …distinguished himself as a cockeyed, deadpan observer of American behavior and, later in life, for his prodigious and distinctive facial hair. Now the two satirists share a further connection.”

One can only wonder what remarks Mark Twain would make today about our government, ourselves, and the absurdities of our world. But undoubtedly they would be insightful and humorous to help us “stand against the assault” and perhaps even give us pause.

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-x_k7zrPUw
• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1arrRQJkA28
• Mark Twain , http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/index.php/about/biography/
• Mark Twain , history.com , http://www.history.com/topics/mark-twain
• Railton, Stephen and University of Virginia Library, Mark Twain In His Times , http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/about/mtabout.html
• Mark Twain’s Interactive Scrapbook, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/index.html
• Mark Twain’s America , IMAX,, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0WioOn8Tkw (Video)
• Middlekauff, Robert, Mark Twain’s Humor - With Examples , https://amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/150305.pdf
• Moss, Walter, Mark Twain’s Progressive and Prophetic Political Humor, http://hollywoodprogressive.com/mark-twain/
• The Mark Twain House and Museum , https://www.marktwainhouse.org/man/biography_main.php

For Teachers :

• Learn More About Mark Twain , PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/index.html
• Lesson 1: Mark Twain and American Humor, National Endowment for the Humanities, https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/mark-twain-and-american-humor#sect-introduction
• Lesson Plan | Mark Twain and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor , WGBH, PBS, https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/773460a8-d817-4fbd-9c1e-15656712348e/lesson-plan-mark-twain-and-the-mark-twain-prize-for-american-humor/#.WT2Y_DMfn-Y
• Mark Twain's Feel for Language and Locale Brings His Stories to Life
• The Story of Samuel Clemens as "Mark Twain"
• A Closer Look at "A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain's Colloquial Prose Style
• Reading Quiz: 'Two Ways of Seeing a River' by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain's Views on Enslavement
• The Meaning of the Pseudonym Mark Twain
• Quotes from Mark Twain, Master of Sarcasm
• Definition and Examples of Humorous Essays
• What Were Mark Twain's Inventions?
• Two Ways of Seeing a River
• A Photo Tour of the Mark Twain House in Connecticut
• Mark Twain & Death
• A Fable by Mark Twain
• 'Life on the Mississippi' Quotes
• Who's the Real Huckleberry Finn?

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: April 5, 2010

The name Mark Twain is a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Moffit Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings. Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. When Jane Clemens was in her 80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: “I suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?” “Yes, the whole time,” she answered. “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” “No,” she said, “afraid you would.”

Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. John Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida , Mo., to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal , where there were greater opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more. In the meantime, the debts accumulated. Still, John Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s (some 70,000 acres [28,000 hectares]) might one day make them wealthy, and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. Late in his life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse:

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent.…It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Judging from his own speculative ventures in silver mining, business, and publishing, it was a curse that Sam Clemens never quite outgrew.

Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), the village was a “white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock’s Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the second became McDougal’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, Mo., where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic (potentially lethal in those days) was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. In 1847 Clemens’s father died of pneumonia. John Clemens’s death contributed further to the family’s financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity. Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. One evening in 1844 Clemens discovered a corpse in his father’s office; it was the body of a California emigrant who had been stabbed in a quarrel and was placed there for the inquest. In January 1845 Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn. Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. As it turned out, Tom Blankenship’s older brother Bence had been secretly taking food to the runaway slave for some weeks before the slave was apparently discovered and killed. Bence’s act of courage and kindness served in some measure as a model for Huck’s decision to help the fugitive Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printer’s apprentice for Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.

Apprenticeships

In 1850 the oldest Clemens boy, Orion, returned from St. Louis, Mo., and began to publish a weekly newspaper. A year later he bought the Hannibal Journal, and Sam and his younger brother Henry worked for him. Sam became more than competent as a typesetter, but he also occasionally contributed sketches and articles to his brother’s paper. Some of those early sketches, such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter (1852), appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals. In 1852, acting as the substitute editor while Orion was out of town, Clemens signed a sketch “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins.” This was his first known use of a pseudonym, and there would be several more ( Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, Josh, and others) before he adopted, permanently, the pen name Mark Twain.

Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer, trying many occupations. It was not until he was 37, he once remarked, that he woke up to discover he had become a “literary person.” In the meantime, he was intent on seeing the world and exploring his own possibilities. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington , D.C.; then he returned to New York, only to find work hard to come by because of fires that destroyed two publishing houses. During his time in the East, which lasted until early 1854, he read widely and took in the sights of these cities. He was acquiring, if not a worldly air, at least a broader perspective than that offered by his rural background. And Clemens continued to write, though without firm literary ambitions, occasionally publishing letters in his brother’s new newspaper. Orion had moved briefly to Muscatine, Iowa , with their mother, where he had established the Muscatine Journal before relocating to Keokuk, Iowa, and opening a printing shop there. Sam Clemens joined his brother in Keokuk in 1855 and was a partner in the business for a little over a year, but he then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio , to work as a typesetter. Still restless and ambitious, he booked passage in 1857 on a steamboat bound for New Orleans , La., planning to find his fortune in South America. Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice.

Having agreed to pay a $500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, with an eye toward obtaining a pilot’s license. (Clemens paid Bixby $100 down and promised to pay the remainder of the substantial fee in installments, something he evidently never managed to do.) Bixby did indeed “learn”—a word Twain insisted on—him the river, but the young man was an apt pupil as well. Because Bixby was an exceptional pilot and had a license to navigate the Missouri River and the upper as well as the lower Mississippi, lucrative opportunities several times took him upstream. On those occasions, Clemens was transferred to other veteran pilots and thereby learned the profession more quickly and thoroughly than he might have otherwise. The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed. Not only did a pilot receive good wages and enjoy universal respect, but he was absolutely free and self-sufficient: “a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth,” he wrote. Clemens enjoyed the rank and dignity that came with the position; he belonged, both informally and officially, to a group of men whose acceptance he cherished; and—by virtue of his membership in the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, obtained soon after he earned his pilot’s license in 1859—he participated in a true “meritocracy” of the sort he admired and would dramatize many years later in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Clemens’s years on the river were eventful in other ways. He met and fell in love with Laura Wright, eight years his junior. The courtship dissolved in a misunderstanding, but she remained the remembered sweetheart of his youth. He also arranged a job for his younger brother Henry on the riverboat Pennsylvania . The boilers exploded, however, and Henry was fatally injured. Clemens was not on board when the accident occurred, but he blamed himself for the tragedy. His experience as a cub and then as a full-fledged pilot gave him a sense of discipline and direction he might never have acquired elsewhere. Before this period his had been a directionless knockabout life; afterward he had a sense of determined possibility. He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch, River Intelligence (1859), lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper. Clemens and the other “starchy boys,” as he once described his fellow riverboat pilots in a letter to his wife, had no particular use for this nonunion man, but Clemens did envy what he later recalled to be Sellers’s delicious pen name, Mark Twain.

The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license. He returned to Hannibal, where he joined the prosecessionist Marion Rangers, a ragtag lot of about a dozen men. After only two uneventful weeks, during which the soldiers mostly retreated from Union troops rumoured to be in the vicinity, the group disbanded. A few of the men joined other Confederate units, and the rest, along with Clemens, scattered. Twain would recall this experience, a bit fuzzily and with some fictional embellishments, in The Private History of the Campaign That Failed (1885). In that memoir he extenuated his history as a deserter on the grounds that he was not made for soldiering. Like the fictional Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he was to publish in 1885, Clemens then lit out for the territory. Huck Finn intends to escape to the Indian country, probably Oklahoma ; Clemens accompanied his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory.

Clemens’s own political sympathies during the war are obscure. It is known at any rate that Orion Clemens was deeply involved in Republican Party politics and in Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemens’s association with Orion did not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once again, he had to shift for himself—mining and investing in timber and silver and gold stocks, oftentimes “prospectively rich,” but that was all. Clemens submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter. He was again embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he succeeded.

The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak production in the late 1870s. Nearby Virginia City was known for its gambling and dance halls, its breweries and whiskey mills, its murders, riots, and political corruption. Years later Twain recalled the town in a public lecture: “It was no place for a Presbyterian,” he said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he added, “And I did not remain one very long.” Nevertheless, he seems to have retained something of his moral integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. This was a dangerous indulgence, for violent retribution was not uncommon.

In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them “Mark Twain.” Apparently the mistranscription of a telegram misled Clemens to believe that the pilot Isaiah Sellers had died and that his cognomen was up for grabs. Clemens seized it. (See Researcher’s Note: Origins of the name Mark Twain.) It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a “literary person.”

Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. In 1864, after challenging the editor of a rival newspaper to a duel and then fearing the legal consequences for this indiscretion, he left Virginia City for San Francisco and became a full-time reporter for the Call. Finding that work tiresome, he began contributing to the Golden Era and the new literary magazine the Californian, edited by Bret Harte. After he published an article expressing his fiery indignation at police corruption in San Francisco, and after a man with whom he associated was arrested in a brawl, Clemens decided it prudent to leave the city for a time. He went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog arrived too late to be included in the volume, but it was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity, and Sam Clemens was following in his wake.

Literary Maturity

The next few years were important for Clemens. After he had finished writing the jumping-frog story but before it was published, he declared in a letter to Orion that he had a “ ‘call’ to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of,” he continued, “but it is my strongest suit.” However much he might deprecate his calling, it appears that he was committed to making a professional career for himself. He continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he needed money. Meanwhile, he tried, unsuccessfully, to publish a book made up of his letters from Hawaii. His first book was in fact The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), but it did not sell well. That same year, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. He had ambitions to enlarge his reputation and his audience, and the announcement of a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land provided him with just such an opportunity. The Alta paid the substantial fare in exchange for some 50 letters he would write concerning the trip. Eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad (1869). It was a great success.

The trip abroad was fortuitous in another way. He met on the boat a young man named Charlie Langdon, who invited Clemens to dine with his family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia; the writer fell in love with her. Clemens’s courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, N.Y., was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870. With financial assistance from Olivia’s father, Clemens bought a one-third interest in the Express of Buffalo, N.Y., and began writing a column for a New York City magazine, the Galaxy. A son, Langdon, was born in November 1870, but the boy was frail and would die of diphtheria less than two years later. Clemens came to dislike Buffalo and hoped that he and his family might move to the Nook Farm area of Hartford, Conn. In the meantime, he worked hard on a book about his experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and sold well. The next month, Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens was born in Elmira. Later that year, Clemens traveled to England. Upon his return, he began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel about political and financial corruption in the United States. The Gilded Age (1873) was remarkably well received, and a play based on the most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became quite popular.

The Gilded Age was Twain’s first attempt at a novel, and the experience was apparently congenial enough for him to begin writing Tom Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. He also published A True Story, a moving dialect sketch told by a former slave, in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in 1874. A second daughter, Clara, was born in June, and the Clemenses moved into their still-unfinished house in Nook Farm later the same year, counting among their neighbours Warner and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe . Old Times on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. The obscure journalist from the wilds of California and Nevada had arrived: he had settled down in a comfortable house with his family; he was known worldwide; his books sold well, and he was a popular favourite on the lecture tour; and his fortunes had steadily improved over the years. In the process, the journalistic and satirical temperament of the writer had, at times, become retrospective. Old Times, which would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit ruefully too, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was coloured by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a “hymn” to childhood. The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer (it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print) indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his comrades—including pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cave—continue to delight children, while the book’s comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.

In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck’s own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885. During that interval, Twain often turned his attention to other projects, only to return again and again to the novel’s manuscript.

Twain believed he had humiliated himself before Boston’s literary worthies when he delivered one of many speeches at a dinner commemorating the 70th birthday of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Twain’s contribution to the occasion fell flat (perhaps because of a failure of delivery or the contents of the speech itself), and some believed he had insulted three literary icons in particular: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes . The embarrassing experience may have in part prompted his removal to Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad (1880), about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for “young people of all ages.” In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby, taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi (1883). All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments, the most disastrous of which was the continued financial support of an inventor, James W. Paige, who was perfecting an automatic typesetting machine. In 1884 Clemens founded his own publishing company, bearing the name of his nephew and business agent, Charles L. Webster, and embarked on a four-month lecture tour with fellow author George W. Cable, both to raise money for the company and to promote the sales of Huckleberry Finn. Not long after that, Clemens began the first of several Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn. All the Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Huck’s voice. What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization. Through Huck, the novel’s narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.

For a time, Clemens’s prospects seemed rosy. After working closely with Ulysses S. Grant , he watched as his company’s publication of the former U.S. president’s memoirs in 1885–86 became an overwhelming success. Clemens believed a forthcoming biography of Pope Leo XIII would do even better. The prototype for the Paige typesetter also seemed to be working splendidly. It was in a generally sanguine mood that he began to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, about the exploits of a practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. So confident was he about prospects for the typesetter that Clemens predicted this novel would be his “swan-song” to literature and that he would live comfortably off the profits of his investment.

Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company was floundering, and cash flow problems meant he was drawing on his royalties to provide capital for the business. Clemens was suffering from rheumatism in his right arm, but he continued to write for magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and by 1891 he had ceased his monthly payments to support work on the Paige typesetter, effectively giving up on an investment that over the years had cost him some $200,000 or more. He closed his beloved house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail, might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. Luckily, he was befriended by a Standard Oil executive, Henry Huttleston Rogers, who undertook to put Clemens’s financial house in order. Clemens assigned his property, including his copyrights, to Olivia, announced the failure of his publishing house, and declared personal bankruptcy. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and to remake his career.

Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twain’s thoughts on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life. One of the maxims from that novel jocularly expresses his point of view: “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Clearly, despite his reversal of fortunes, Twain had not lost his sense of humour. But he was frustrated too—frustrated by financial difficulties but also by the public’s perception of him as a funnyman and nothing more. The persona of Mark Twain had become something of a curse for Samuel Clemens.

Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (serialized 1895–96), anonymously in hopes that the public might take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was the author; when the novel was first published in book form, in 1896, his name appeared on the volume’s spine but not on its title page. However, in later years he would publish some works anonymously, and still others he declared could not be published until long after his death, on the largely erroneous assumption that his true views would scandalize the public. Clemens’s sense of wounded pride was necessarily compromised by his indebtedness, and he embarked on a lecture tour in July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C., Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in England a little more than a year afterward. Clemens was in London when he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis. A pall settled over the Clemens household; they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work. He wrote a great deal he did not intend to publish during those years, but he did publish Following the Equator (1897), a relatively serious account of his world lecture tour. By 1898 the revenue generated from the tour and the subsequent book, along with Henry Huttleston Rogers’s shrewd investments of his money, had allowed Clemens to pay his creditors in full. Rogers was shrewd as well in the way he publicized and redeemed the reputation of “Mark Twain” as a man of impeccable moral character. Palpable tokens of public approbation are the three honorary degrees conferred on Clemens in his last years—from Yale University in 1901, from the University of Missouri in 1902, and, the one he most coveted, from Oxford University in 1907. When he traveled to Missouri to receive his honorary Doctor of Laws, he visited old friends in Hannibal along the way. He knew that it would be his last visit to his hometown.

Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger. (None of the manuscripts was ever completed, and they were posthumously combined and published in 1916.) He also started What Is Man? (published anonymously in 1906), a dialogue in which a wise “Old Man” converts a resistant “Young Man” to a brand of philosophical determinism. He began to dictate his autobiography, which he would continue to do until a few months before he died. Some of Twain’s best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt: an essay against anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews (1899); a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man Sitting in Darkness (1901); an essay on lynching, The United States of Lyncherdom (posthumously published in 1923); and a pamphlet on the brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905).

Clemens’s last years have been described as his “bad mood” period. The description may or may not be apt. It is true that in his polemical essays and in much of his fiction during this time he was venting powerful moral feelings and commenting freely on the “damn’d human race.” But he had always been against sham and corruption, greed, cruelty, and violence. Even in his California days, he was principally known as the “Moralist of the Main” and only incidentally as the “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” It was not the indignation he was expressing during these last years that was new; what seemed to be new was the frequent absence of the palliative humour that had seasoned the earlier outbursts. At any rate, even though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, there was no particular reason for Clemens to be in a good mood.

The family, including Clemens himself, had suffered from one sort of ailment or another for a very long time. In 1896 his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy, and the search for a cure, or at least relief, had taken the family to different doctors throughout Europe. By 1901 his wife’s health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in 1902, and for a time Clemens was allowed to see her for only five minutes a day. Removing to Italy seemed to improve her condition, but that was only temporary. She died on June 5, 1904. Something of his affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is conveyed in the moving piece Eve’s Diary (1906). The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” Clemens had written a commemorative poem on the anniversary of Susy’s death, and Eve’s Diary serves the equivalent function for the death of his wife. He would have yet another occasion to publish his grief. His daughter Jean died on Dec. 24, 1909. The Death of Jean (1911) was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, “to keep my heart from breaking.”

It is true that Clemens was bitter and lonely during his last years. He took some solace in the grandfatherly friendships he established with young schoolgirls he called his “angelfish.” His “Angelfish Club” consisted of 10 to 12 girls who were admitted to membership on the basis of their intelligence, sincerity, and good will, and he corresponded with them frequently. In 1906–07 he published selected chapters from his ongoing autobiography in the North American Review. Judging from the tone of the work, writing his autobiography often supplied Clemens with at least a wistful pleasure. These writings and others reveal an imaginative energy and humorous exuberance that do not fit the picture of a wholly bitter and cynical man. He moved into his new house in Redding, Conn., in June 1908, and that too was a comfort. He had wanted to call it “Innocents at Home,” but his daughter Clara convinced him to name it “Stormfield,” after a story he had written about a sea captain who sailed for heaven but arrived at the wrong port. Extracts from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven was published in installments in Harper’s Magazine in 1907–08. It is an uneven but delightfully humorous story, one that critic and journalist H.L. Mencken ranked on a level with Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Little Bessie and Letters from the Earth (both published posthumously) were also written during this period, and, while they are sardonic, they are antically comic as well. Clemens thought Letters from the Earth was so heretical that it could never be published. However, it was published in a book by that name, along with other previously unpublished writings, in 1962, and it reinvigorated public interest in Twain’s serious writings. The letters did present unorthodox views—that God was something of a bungling scientist and human beings his failed experiment, that Christ, not Satan, devised hell, and that God was ultimately to blame for human suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy. Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man.

Clara Clemens married in October 1909 and left for Europe by early December. Jean died later that month. Clemens was too grief-stricken to attend the burial services, and he stopped working on his autobiography. Perhaps as an escape from painful memories, he traveled to Bermuda in January 1910. By early April he was having severe chest pains. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine joined him, and together they returned to Stormfield. Clemens died on April 21. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine (first published in full in 1995). Clearly, Clemens’s mind was on final things; just as clearly, he had not altogether lost his sense of humour. Among the pieces of advice he offered Paine, for when his turn to enter heaven arrived, was this: “Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in.” Clemens was buried in the family plot in Elmira, N.Y., alongside his wife, his son, and two of his daughters. Only Clara survived him.

Reputation and Assessment

Shortly after Clemens’s death, Howells published My Mark Twain (1910), in which he pronounced Samuel Clemens “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” Twenty-five years later Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Both compliments are grandiose and a bit obscure. For Howells, Twain’s significance was apparently social—the humorist, Howells wrote, spoke to and for the common American man and woman; he emancipated and dignified the speech and manners of a class of people largely neglected by writers (except as objects of fun or disapproval) and largely ignored by genteel America. For Hemingway, Twain’s achievement was evidently an aesthetic one principally located in one novel. For later generations, however, the reputation of and controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn largely eclipsed the vast body of Clemens’s substantial literary corpus: the novel has been dropped from some American schools’ curricula on the basis of its characterization of the slave Jim, which some regard as demeaning, and its repeated use of an offensive racial epithet.

As a humorist and as a moralist, Twain worked best in short pieces. Roughing It is a rollicking account of his adventures in the American West, but it is also seasoned with such exquisite yarns as Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral and The Story of the Old Ram; A Tramp Abroad is for many readers a disappointment, but it does contain the nearly perfect Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn. In A True Story, told in an African American dialect, Twain transformed the resources of the typically American humorous story into something serious and profoundly moving. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is relentless social satire; it is also the most formally controlled piece Twain ever wrote. The originality of the longer works is often to be found more in their conception than in their sustained execution. The Innocents Abroad is perhaps the funniest of all of Twain’s books, but it also redefined the genre of the travel narrative by attempting to suggest to the reader, as Twain wrote, “how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes.” Similarly, in Tom Sawyer, he treated childhood not as the achievement of obedience to adult authority but as a period of mischief-making fun and good-natured affection. Like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which he much admired, Huckleberry Finn rang changes on the picaresque novel that are of permanent interest.

Twain was not the first Anglo-American to treat the problems of race and racism in all their complexity, but, along with that of Herman Melville, his treatment remains of vital interest more than a hundred years later. His ability to swiftly and convincingly create a variety of fictional characters rivals that of Charles Dickens. Twain’s scalawags, dreamers, stalwarts, and toughs, his solicitous aunts, ambitious politicians, carping widows, false aristocrats, canny but generous slaves, sententious moralists, brave but misguided children, and decent but complicitous bystanders, his loyal lovers and friends, and his fractious rivals—these and many more constitute a virtual census of American types. And his mastery of spoken language, of slang and argot and dialect, gave these figures a voice. Twain’s democratic sympathies and his steadfast refusal to condescend to the lowliest of his creations give the whole of his literary production a point of view that is far more expansive, interesting, and challenging than his somewhat crusty philosophical speculations. Howells, who had known most of the important American literary figures of the 19th century and thought them to be more or less like one another, believed that Twain was unique. Twain will always be remembered first and foremost as a humorist, but he was a great deal more—a public moralist, popular entertainer, political philosopher, travel writer, and novelist. Perhaps it is too much to claim, as some have, that Twain invented the American point of view in fiction, but that such a notion might be entertained indicates that his place in American literary culture is secure.

Thomas V. Quirk

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Mark Twain's Mississippi

• Primary Source Materials

Mark Twain's Biography

by Gregg Camfield, PhD, University of California-Merced

On November 30, 1835, nearly thirty years before he took the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, a hamlet some 130 miles north-northwest of St. Louis, and 30 miles inland from the Mississippi River. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had earlier that year moved the family there from Tennessee. In Tennessee, he had accumulated much land, a pair of slaves, a wife, and five children, but his efforts as a lawyer, storekeeper, and local politician did not yield the wealth he desired. Like many of his contemporaries, he decided that the way to a fortunate future was to move west. His brother-in-law, John Quarles, had established a farm in the new hamlet of Florida and invited John Marshall Clemens, his wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, and their brood of children to the new country.

Trained to be a country lawyer, John Marshall was no farmer, and even though Americans were extraordinarily litigious, it would take time (and denser population) to build a law practice that could support a family. He fell back on keeping store, and again did not thrive. Given that the river was where a merchant had access to markets, John Marshall moved his family to the as-yet-unincorporated town of Hannibal, about 30 miles east-northeast of Florida. There, too, his business ventures, in his dry-goods store, in his land dealings, even in his efforts to trade slaves, did not prosper. The family found itself slipping toward poverty — so desperate, in fact, that they had to sell off their furniture — before finally, John Marshall's political ambitions ended in his election to justice of the peace. While the fees he earned in this office were not enough to make the family's fortunes, they were the difference between poverty and a competence. Yet with fortunes finally looking up, John Marshall Clemens took ill and died in 1847. The remaining Clemens family (mother Jane, sister Pamela, and brothers Orion, Samuel, and Henry) had to make their way by hook and crook. Orion was already off in St. Louis, working as a journeyman printer. The wages he sent home kept the family afloat. Within a year, however, young Samuel could no longer afford the luxuries of childhood, school and play. Instead, he began his first apprenticeship, to Hannibal printer William Ament, publisher of the grandly named Missouri Courier.

In working for Ament, Sam learned about printing, the first mass production industry, almost as it had been practiced from the beginning. In a country print shop, a printer had to do everything from the editorial side, to type setting, to press-work, to distributing the finished product. There was no division of labor, and only hints of the industrial revolution. Yet brother Orion in St. Louis was working in a major print shop, as a compositor rather than as a printer. Orion, in keeping with craft guild principles, wanted to be his own master, so in 1851, he returned to Hannibal, bought one of the other Hannibal newspapers, the equally grandly named Western Union, and took on his younger brothers Samuel and Henry as his apprentices. He soon combined his struggling newspaper with the Hannibal Journal, but even a merger could not turn a local paper into a good living, especially for an owner whose politics were not fully congenial to Hannibal.

Neither younger brother much appreciated working for their quirky older brother. Orion fancied himself to be a new Benjamin Franklin, and used to badger his younger brothers with Franklin's aphorisms about industry, efficiency, temperance, and frugality. The frugality was imposed by the fact that such old-fashioned printing was not lucrative, even when it was a central part of the social fabric of the American small town. Young Samuel accepted the push toward industry and temperance, even as younger brother Henry rebelled by being lazy and sloppy in his work. Orion's response to Henry's poor work was often to put more on Samuel. Naturally, Sam came to resent his position, too. In 1853, he bolted, heading first for St. Louis to work as a typesetter, then heading out of the Mississippi Valley for the first time to work as a typesetter in a number of eastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

His correspondence home shows how much he accepted his responsibility to his mother, promising her a portion of his wages, yet his contact with the new industrial economy of the big cities prevented him from making much financial progress in his work. Demoralized that he was unable to make his fortune, he rejoined his family, which, in the interim, had also abandoned Hannibal. His sister had already moved to St. Louis when in 1851 she married William A. Moffet, a successful merchant. His brother Orion had sold his Hannibal print shop to move to Muscatine, Iowa, to free soil, where his abolitionist ideas were neither a threat to his livelihood nor his health. Samuel at this point did not oppose slavery; his attitudes were shaped primarily by those held by his Missouri neighbors, especially by his father and his Uncle Quarles. While his father never had many slaves, and in financial exigency had been forced to sell, he had helped uphold slavery in Missouri. His uncle was a farmer whose success depended not only on his own work, but on the labor of his slaves. In the years before he began his apprenticeship, Sam had spent many summers on the Quarles farm. But Orion's time in St. Louis had put him in touch with organized labor which, though often quite racist in its outlook, was opposed to slave labor as a system that undercut wages. When he moved to Iowa at the very end of 1853, he became active in anti-slavery politics, leading him ultimately to working for Lincoln's election in 1860.

Sam's return to the Mississippi Valley in late spring of 1854 was not a return to his childhood home. Now living in a free state, but with strong family ties to Missouri, his return to work for his brother was a stop-gap. Indeed, late in that year and early in 1855, he worked in St. Louis before returning to Muscatine. In 1856, he left home again, this time for a stint of typesetting in Cincinnati. Itinerant as always, Clemens was but briefly satisfied in Cincinnati, and when on his way home in 1857, he decided, instead, to change careers to become a riverboat pilot. In order to do so, he had to pay $500, half up front, with the balance to be paid from his first wages when the apprenticeship was over. (Multiply these numbers by 25 to find a rough equivalent to today's dollars.) He had to borrow the down payment from his brother-in-law. Young Sam did not have good role models for how to spend money, but given how poor he was, the amount he was willing to borrow says something about how much he wanted to become a riverboat pilot.

Fictionalized slightly, “Old Times on the Mississippi” tells the story of this apprenticeship. With the addition of the story of his successful efforts to get his younger brother, Henry, a job on a steamboat and his younger brother's death in a steamboat accident, found in chapters 18-20 of Life on the Mississippi, Twain's own account of his days as an apprentice on a steamboat, and his account of the social and political circumstances of steam boating, is one of the best accounts of river life ever written. But he left off the tale at the end of his apprenticeship, telling us next to nothing about his brief, successful career in boating. When fully licensed as a pilot in the St. Louis to New Orleans trade, Sam Clemens found regular and lucrative employment, enabling him not only to pay off his debts and help support his mother, but also giving him enough extra income to indulge himself.

I can "bank" in the neighborhood of $100 a month . . . and that will satisfy me for the present . . . . Bless me! . . . what respect Prosperity commands. Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," [of the Western Boatmen's Benevolent Association] and receive only the customary fraternal greeting — but now they say, "Why how are you, old fellow — when did you get in?" And the young pilots who used to tell me, patronisingly, that I could never learn the river, cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. . . . I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions.

Not surprisingly, one of his chief indulgences was to speculate in commodities, buying and shipping them as he went up and down the river. True to family form, he lost money.

But his newfound wealth and the company he began to keep helped him leave his mother's and brother's world emotionally as well as physically. He was a chief player in an industry that was so modern and cosmopolitan that it figures in such stories as T.B. Thorpe's “The Big Bear of Arkansas” and Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, as a symbol of America: of its politics, its trade, its industry, its cultural and ethnic diversity, of its inexorable changes. His letters from the period show him indulging his restless spirit in taking advantage of the entertainments of two of America's great cities. From things as innocent as learning to dance, which according to his mother's strict religion encouraged sin, to learning to drink and curse, which were culturally normal but coming under regular attack in an evangelical and reformist age, Clemens explored behavior and attitudes that were new to him. And the powers of observation required of him as a pilot certainly helped him when he turned to journalism and then to writing novels, sketches, and stories.

Had the Civil War not interrupted the river trade, Samuel Clemens might have spent his life as a pilot, writing no more than an occasional newspaper squib. Clemens was not a hothead on either side, in part because his livelihood depended on commerce between the North and the South up and down the great riverway. In the election of 1860, Sam Clemens voted his bread and butter. Spurning both the Democratic Party and the new Republican Party, Clemens voted for the Constitutional Union Party's ticket of Bell and Everett. But when the war began, Clemens's vague leanings toward states' rights and slavery came out. First, he holed up with his sister's family in St. Louis, fearing that he would be impressed as a pilot for Union transport or gun boats. Then, in the late spring of 1861, he answered the call of the states' rights leaning Missouri Governor, C.F. Jackson, to form militias to “repel the invader.” Technically, Missouri never joined the Confederacy, so Clemens's brief stint as an irregular soldier cannot be classified as time as a Confederate soldier, but given that Clemens and his fellow militia-men knew full well that they were to fight against the troops of the United States Army, such semantic distinctions are unimportant. What is important, is that Clemens was not confident enough of his actions to let his brother Orion know of them.

The Civil War radically transformed the nation and many of the lives in it, and that was almost as true for Sam Clemens as it was for so many others. Sam Clemens planned to pass the few months the War was expected to last out West, living off his savings while prospecting for silver and gold. As the War dragged on, his savings ran out. He did not strike it rich, and facing poverty again, he returned to the printing industry, this time on the editorial side. In part because he was a talented writer and in part because he was well connected politically, he was hired by the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise to be a reporter. There he served yet another apprenticeship, this time in literary work. There he first used his famous pen name, “Mark Twain,” derived from his days on the River. The call “Mark Twain” means, literally, “at this point, two,” meaning that at a given point, the river is two fathoms (twelve feet) deep. This was the usual depth for safe passage for a Mississippi River steamboat. (Though in Virginia City, some of his friends interpreted “Mark Twain” to stand for Clemens's tendency to order two drinks at a time and mark them on his bar tab.) There he began to work as a roving reporter, and the reputation he earned in Nevada expanded until newspapers from California to New York sent him all over the world to report on politics, the arts, fashion, commerce — anything that would entertain or inform readers. His life as a reporter and then as a belletristic writer led him to make his home in Nevada, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut, England, Germany, France, and Italy, but never again in the Mississippi Valley.

While the War started a chain of events that removed Samuel Clemens physically from the Mississippi Valley, it did not remove him imaginatively. If anything, the War also forced Clemens to rethink what he believed. As he put it in a letter to his Missouri friend Jacob H. Burrough in a 1 November 1876 letter,

As you describe me I can picture myself as I was, twenty-two years of age. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug . . . . Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness . . . . That is what I was at 19-20; & that is what the average Southerner is at 60 to-day.

The process that began in 1860 did not end until he died in 1910, and in his imagination he revisited the Mississippi Valley incessantly, in one literary work after another, including The Gilded Age (1871) “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1874), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893), a series of sequels to the Tom and Huck stories, and in “Chapters from My Autobiography.”

Biography Online

Mark Twain Biography

Early life of Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens (later better known by his pen name Mark Twain) was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835 to the son of a Tennessee country merchant. Twain was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the great Mississippi River. At the age of 11, his father died and the next year Twain had to gain employment as a printer’s apprentice. From an early age, he began contributing articles and humorous sketches to the Hannibal Journal. At the age of 18, he left Missouri and went to New York, Philadelphia and St Louis. He furthered his education in public libraries and became active in the print unions. He was a vocal supporter of organised labour throughout his life, seeing how businesses were in a position to offer poor conditions and low pay to workers.

In 1859, he became a river pilot on the Mississippi River. It was a lucrative job with a salary of $250 a month. The job required great knowledge of the river which he assiduously gained.

By 1865, he had his first major publishing success – “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County “.  This was a humorous tall tale which brought him much success. The popular acclaim for this first publishing success led to further travelling opportunities including a tour of Europe and the Middle East. This journey gave him material for his humorous travel diary – ‘ The Innocents Abroad’  ( 1869). Humour was an important element in Twain’s writings and speeches.

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.” (1899)

Twain’s quick wit helped to make him one of the most famous Americans of his generation.

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”

― Mark Twain

In 1870, Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon. Olivia came from a wealthy and liberal NY family, who cultivated a wide circle of liberal and progressive activists. Through his wife, he met people such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and utopian socialist William Dean Howells. It was a very different society to the conservative slave state of Missouri where he had been brought up. He also became friendly with Helen Keller ; Twain was instrumental in helping to finance Keller’s education and was deeply impressed by her courage in overcoming her deafblindness.

Twain noted that he became more radical as his life progressed. He said that after an initial spell of enthusiasm for imperialism he became very suspicious of imperialist motives, e.g., he was critical of American intervention in the Philippines. Twain became vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1901 until his death in 1910.

Twain was also a staunch supporter of abolition and black emancipation. He said that Lincoln’s Proclamation ‘Not only set the black slaves free but set the white man free also.’

The early works of Twain were generally light-hearted and humorous. However, as his writing and life developed, his books and articles increasingly became more serious and focused on the pressing social issues facing America.

“I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

Harper’s Magazine , Sept. 1899

With the same deft touch and comic turn, Twain became a satirist on the cruelties and injustice of mankind and gave vent to his deeply held beliefs.

It is Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which are considered Twain’s greatest achievements. Hemingway later wrote that:

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

After working briefly for the Buffalo Express newspaper, Twain took his family and three daughters to live in Hartford, Connecticut. The family lived there for 17 years, and this gave Mark Twain a firm base to devote himself to writing. It was here that he wrote his best-known books – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1864 ) As his fame and profile grew, Twain gained a substantial income through his writing. However, unfortunately, he lost a small fortune through a misplaced investment in the Paige typesetting machines. He is estimated to have lost $300,000 before it was made obsolete by the newly developed Linotype.

Combined with money lost through his own publishing house, Twain faced bankruptcy but was saved with the help of financier Henry Rogers. Twain then worked hard – undertaking a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts in full.

Despite a successful writing career and worldwide fame – which included an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford – Twain suffered depression from painful personal tragedies. At an early age, Twain lost his first son. But, it was the death of his daughter, Sudsy, in 1896, which brought about an onset of real depression. This was further complicated by the death of his wife, Olivia in 1901.

Twain and Religion

“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian”

– Mark Twain

Twain wrote many articles on religion – many of which weren’t published during his lifetime because they were considered too critical of religion. Twain criticised many aspects of organised religion and Christianity. He indicated that he believed in a God, but not in messages and revelations, which people often claimed came from God. His exact views are not precise as he expressed different opinions at different times. He was brought up a Presbyterian and later helped build a Presbyterian church for his brother.

Even as he approached the end of his life, Twain remained as witty as ever. A much-repeated quote in full is:

“James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Twain also satirised aspects of the Gilded Age of America – the unbridled pursuit of material wealth through corrupt and monopoly practices. In 1973, he wrote (with Charles Dudley Warner) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The book was Twain’s only collaboration, and although not too well known, the title came to describe the whole era of corruption and greed that epitomised aspects of America in the late Nineteenth Century.

Twain died on April 21st, 1910 from a heart attack – one day after Hailey’s Comet closest approach to earth. (Twain had been born close to Hailey Comet’s previous approach to earth in 1835.) In fact, in 1909, Twain had predicted he would die in close to proximity to the return of Hailey’s Comet.

As well as being a writer, Mark Twain had a fascination with science. He developed three inventions which gained patents; this included a self-pasting scrapbook.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Mark Twain ”, Oxford, UK  www.biographyonline.net Published 21st February 2010. Updated 8th February 2018.

Mark Twain: Collection of short stories

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• Mark Twain Quotes

By Ellen Gutoskey | Mar 14, 2023, 4:22 PM EDT

AUTHORS (1835–1910); FLORIDA, MISSOURI

Mark Twain, author of classic books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Gilded Age (plus a wide variety of short stories and other literature), had a quick wit and prolific body of work that has made him one of America's most quoted—and misquoted—writers. Find out more about his life and legacy, as well as some quotes about love, loss, and comedy.

1. Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

After trying out other aliases like “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” and “Sergeant Fathom,” Samuel Langhorne Clemens adopted “ Mark Twain ” in 1863. He claimed the idea came from his stint as a Mississippi River steamboat captain before the Civil War—sailors used to call out “mark twain!” to identify when the water was two fathoms (or 12 feet) deep.

2. Samuel Clemens's signature was discovered in the Mark Twain Cave in July 2019.

Mark Twain was known to have spent his boyhood exploring the three miles of passageways in a cave in Hannibal, Missouri, that would later become the inspiration for a scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . For more than a century, visitors have examined the walls for some sign of the author’s time there—and, during a tour in July 2019, one hawk-eyed spelunker finally spotted the word Clemens  among the other names that line the walls.

3. The Mark Twain National Forest could’ve been named after a different famous Missourian.

When the Department of Agriculture bought more than 3 million acres of land in Missouri and Arkansas in 1934 and 1935, various forestry professionals chimed in with their opinions about which Missourian deserved to be the namesake for the expansive soon-to-be national forest. Other contenders included World War I general John J. Pershing, poet Eugene Field, and pioneer Daniel Boone (who was actually born in Pennsylvania, though he died in Missouri).

More Articles About Mark Twain:

4. And Mark Twain also has a lake named after him.

A little over 30 miles from Hannibal, Missouri, the 18,600-acre Mark Twain Lake is Missouri’s seventh largest . The area not only boasts beaches, hiking trails, camping grounds, and other outdoor activities, it’s also home to the Mark Twain State Park, where you can visit the tiny two-room cabin where Clemens was born in 1835.

5. Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, has a whopping 25 rooms.

Mark Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, had three daughters and a son, Langdon, who died at just 19 months. The couple's daughters were:

• Olivia Susan "Susy" Clemens
• Clara Langdon Clemens
• Jane "Jean" Lampton Clemens

The family lived in their Hartford, Connecticut, mansion for 17 years, between 1874 and 1891. It was during that time that Clemens wrote his most famous books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , Life on the Mississippi , The Prince and the Pauper , A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , and, of course, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

6. Books weren’t Mark Twain’s only claim to fame.

He also patented several inventions during his career, including: A convoluted trivia board game called Memory Builder , which required an extensive knowledge of figures, dates, and events across European and American history; a self-adhesive scrapbook that worked much like an envelope; and an adjustable, detachable garment clasp that was primarily intended for suspenders, but ended up being used mostly for bras.

Mark Twain Books You Should Know:

• The Innocents Abroad (1869)
• Roughing It (1872)
• The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
• A Tramp Abroad (1880)
• The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
• Life on the Mississippi (1883)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
• The American Claimant (1892)
• The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
• Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
• Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
• Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897)
• A Horse's Tale (1906)
• The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

Funny Mark Twain Quotes

• “Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.”
• “Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.”
• “I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather.”
• “A use has been found for everything but snoring.”
• “There would be a power of fun in skating if you could do it with somebody else’s muscles.”
• “You ought never to take anything that don’t belong to you—if you cannot carry it off.”
• “Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.”

Mark Twain's Quotes About Love

• “Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”
• “Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.”
• “When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”
• “The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter.”

Mark Twain's Quotes About Life and Death

• “Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.”
• “Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.”
• “It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork.”
• “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
• “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
• “Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.”
• “Life: we laugh and laugh, then cry and cry, then feebler laugh, then die.”
• “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.”

Mark Twain's Quotes About Travel

• “There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.”
• “Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven and hell and I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.”
• “Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.”
• “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Historical Guide to Mark Twain

Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain  addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.

About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's principal concern throughout her career has been literature and social justice. Much of her work has focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. 

Her broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the challenge of doing transnational American Studies; the place of humor and satire in movements for social change; the role literature can play in the fight against racism; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare;  the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; American theatre history; and the development of feminist criticism.   Although many of her publications have centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Malkiel, Tillie Olsen, Tino Villanueva, and Walt Whitman.  

After receiving her B.A.from Yale College ( summa cum laude, phi beta kappa ), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow,  has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender and has been a Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor, co-author,  or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays, columns, and reviews. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in China, Turkey, Japan, and Korea.

Her most recent monograph is  Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee  (named runner-up for the best book award in the general nonfiction category, London Book Festival, 2015) (Rutgers University Press, 2015; paperback, 2017), a book that Junot Díaz called "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States." She is also the author of:  From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America  (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985);  Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book " by  Choice ) (Oxford, 1993);  Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture  (Oxford, 1997);  and  Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture  (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by  Choice ) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).  She is the editor of the 29-volume  Oxford Mark Twain  (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009) - an edition that  Modern Language Review  called "an act of genius." She is also editor of the  Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain  (Oxford, 2002),  "Is He Dead? " A New Comedy by Mark Twain  (University of California, 2003),  Mark Twain's Book of Animals  (University of California Press, 2009), and  The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work  (Library of America, 2010).

She helped guide  Is He Dead?,  a neglected play by Mark Twain that she uncovered in the archives, to Broadway.  She was a producer of  Is He Dead?,  adapted by   David Ives, which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. Since it closed on Broadway, it has had 478 productions in 48 states and Australia, Canada, China, Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

She is the co-editor, most recently, of  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad  (Stanford University Press, 2019), as well as  Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism  (Oxford, 1994);  People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity  (Wisconsin, 1996);  The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America  (3 vols., M.E. Sharpe, 1997);   'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar  (Random House, 2005),  Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2006),  Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition  (Prentice-Hall, 2011), a special issue of  Arizona Quarterly  on  Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910  (2005);and a special issue of  African American Review  devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's  "Race and American Culture "  book series with Arnold Rampersad.

She has served as President of the American Studies Association and of the Mark Twain Circle of America. She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division.   She has given keynote talks at conferences in Basel, Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jiangmen, Kolkata,  Kunming, Kyoto,  La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the  New York Times,  and twice on the front page of the  New York Times  Arts section.

In 2023, she was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for “Lifetime Achievement And Outstanding Contribution to American Studies” by the American Studies Association.

In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for  international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world."

In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for “Scholarly Innovation and Creativity” by the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2017, she was awarded the John S. Tuckey lifetime achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (the first woman to receive this award, which was established in 1991, and is given every four years). The award announcement recognized her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." In 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain."  

The Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, she is Director of Stanford's American Studies Program. She served as  a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and was a member of the international jury for the 2013 Francqui Prize (awarded to an outstanding young scholar in Belgium). In 2009 she co-founded the online, open-access, peer-reviewed  Journal of Transnational American Studies.  

She is co-founder and co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project  with Gordon H. Chang, the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Stanford.  The Project is a  collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University.  Its goal is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured  in cultural memory in the U.S. and China. Her recent publications related to this project include “Seeing Absence, Evoking Presence: History and the Art of Zhi Lin ”  in   Rock Hushka, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Shawn Wong,  Zhi LIN: In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads.  Tacoma, Washington: Tacoma Art Museum, (2017);   從天使城到長島：美洲橫貫鐵路竣工後在美國的鐵路華工[“From Los Angeles to Long Island: Chinese Railroad Workers in America after the Transcontinental”] in  北美鐵路華工：歷史、文學與視覺再現 [ Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: Recovery and Representation ], edited by Hsinya Huang [黃心雅] Taipei: Bookman  [台北：書林出版社]  (2017); and "The Chinese as Railroad Workers after Promontory" in  The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental,  edited by Fishkin and Chang (Stanford University Press, 2019).  Her edition of  Why and How the Chinese Emigrate, and the means they adopt for the purpose of reaching America  by Russell Conwell (1871), was published in China  in 2019 as  《为何与如何：中国人为何出国与如何进入美国》 (1871)   edited, with original introduction, notes and appendices, by Fishkin,  and translated by YAO Ting [姚婷]  (Beijing: China Overseas Chinese Publishing House). It is the first Chinese translation of this important but neglected nineteenth-century text which is a surprising precursor to  the New Journalism of the 1960s.

The Chinese Railroad Workers Project has received support from the President of Stanford, the UPS Fund at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2019, a jury of top professionals in architecture, engineering, planning and history awarded a  60-panel bilingual  Chinese Workers and the Railroad Traveling Exhibit  organized by the Project  a Preservation Design Award and a Trustees' Award for Excellence from the California Preservation Foundation. (The exhibit, which debuted at Stanford, has traveled to venues around the US including Boston City Hall and the Utah State Capital; public libraries in California, Ohio, Michigan, and Utah; San Diego State University and Menlo College; the California State Railroad Museum and the Stanford Mansion in Sacramento; the Niles Canyon Railway Museum (Fremont, CA), and Blackhawk Museum (Danville, CA); community centers and Asian festivals around the country; and Wuyi University (Jiangmen, China). 

Two other current projects involve collaborations with colleagues in translation studies and computer science at the Université de Lille in France (Ronald Jenn and Amel Fraisse).  One is a transnational print and digital project that tracks  the global circulation of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn    and the cultural work the novel performs in a wide range contexts, a project supported by Maison Européenne des Science de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS). A Special Forum entiitled "Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"  was published in the  Journal of Transnational American Studies , co-edited by Fishkin and Jenn with Tsuyoshi Ishihara (Uniiversty of Tokyo), Holger Kersten (University of Halle-Wittenberg), and Selina Lai-Henderson (Duke Kunshan University).    The second is the ROSETTA Project - Resources for Endangered Languages Through Translated Texts, a project designed to develop resources for digitally under-resourced languages through translations of  Huckleberry Finn , a project supported by the France-Stanford Center. The ROSETTA Project recently organized a workshop at Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage that will become a special issue of the  Journal of Digital Humanities and Data Mining.  The ROSETTA Project and Global Huck are also supported by Huma-Num (la TGIR des humanités numériques).

She has two current book projects. One is a book entitled  Jim (Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade),  which will appear in the “Black Lives” biography series edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacquelyn Goldsby for Yale University Press. The other is a book about how Hal Holbrook made Mark Twain a social critic for our time.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is interviewed by CGTN about the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.

New American Studies Prize named for Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Giving Voice to Chinese Railroad Workers

Chinese Railroad Workers on the Long Island Railroad

Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Website

Lifetime Achievement Award in Mark Twain Studies

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

Featured Interview in Inside Higher Education

The Oxford Mark Twain

The Journal of Transnational American Studies

Feminist Engagements

Mark Twain's Book of Animals

The Mark Twain Anthology

American Studies Program at Stanford

Featured Interview in Americana

"Is He Dead?" Production History

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6.2: Biography: Mark Twain

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),   better known by his pen name Mark Twain , was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “The Great American Novel.”

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer . After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise .   In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it”, too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,”   and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”

Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn , he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain’s works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools.

A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain’s works is an ongoing process. Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995 and 2015.

View Mark Twain’s full biography on Wikipedia.

• Mark Twain. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of Mark Twain. Authored by : Matthew Brady. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Twain,_Brady-Handy_photo_portrait,_Feb_7,_1871,_cropped.jpg . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Writers Abroad

Biography: mark twain.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),   better known by his pen name Mark Twain , was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “The Great American Novel.”

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer . After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise .   In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it”, too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,”   and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”

Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn , he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain’s works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools.

A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain’s works is an ongoing process. Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995 and 2015.

View Mark Twain’s full biography on Wikipedia.

• Mark Twain. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Image of Mark Twain. Authored by : Matthew Brady. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Twain,_Brady-Handy_photo_portrait,_Feb_7,_1871,_cropped.jpg . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

• Occupation: Author
• Born: November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri
• Died: April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut
• Best known for: Writing the books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
• "The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."
• "The secret of getting ahead is getting started."
• "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
• "Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
• "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
• Twain married Olivia Langdon in 1870. They had three daughters and one son.
• He joined a Confederate militia for two weeks at the start of the Civil War, but quit before he had to fight.
• He was a strong supporter of putting an end to slavery . He also supported women's rights and suffrage .
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is sometimes referred to as "The Great American Novel."
• He claimed to have foreseen his brother's death in a dream a month before his brother died.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

FAMOUS AUTHORS

An iconic figure of the American literature whose works have reached, entertained and inspired a global readership, Mark Twain was the exceptional author of the famous Huckleberry Finn (1885) which is considered to be one of the first great American novels.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth child of John Marshall Clemens, a judge and Jane Lampton who had no idea they had become parents to what would be one of the most famous personalities in America. In 1839, four years after his birth, Samuel’s family moved 35 miles east to their Hill Street home in Hannibal. The bustling port city of Hannibal where steamboats arrived from St. Louis and New Orleans day and night would later be featured fictitiously as the town of St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

The death of his father in 1847 left the family in a financial crunch forcing Samuel to drop out of school while studying in grade five. He set out to work in order to support himself and the family. Among the many jobs Samuel undertook was becoming a printer’s apprentice and a journeyman printer. Samuel realized his love of writing while working as a printer and editorial assistant at his brother Orion’s newspaper. In 1857, a young Samuel left for St. Louis where he became a river pilot’s apprentice earning a license in 1858. He travelled frequently between St. Louis and New Orleans, with a growing appreciation for the world’s second longest river which he admiringly illustrates through words in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi (1883). It was during his days as a river pilot that Samuel acquired the pseudonym, Mark Twain which is a river term referring to being safe to navigate when the depth of water is 12 feet for the boat to be sounded.

The outbreak of Civil war in 1861 brought the river trade to stand still. Twain began working as a reporter for several newspapers all over the United States. Some publications he reported for included Territorial Enterprise, The Alta Californian, San Francisco Morning Call, Sacramento Union and The Galaxy. He travelled extensively during this period while prolifically writing short stories such as Advice for Little Girls (1867) and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County (1867) which was published in the New York Saturday Press. His first book, The Innocents Abroad was published in 1869. Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon in 1870. They had four children, one of whom died in infancy and two died in their twenties.

A productive writer, Twain continued to gain recognition as a writer for his work of quality. In 1876, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer followed by The Adventured of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. He was awarded an honorary Masters of Art degree from Yale University in 1888. Twain began a worldwide lecturing tour in 1895. Oxford University also awarded him an honorary Doctorate of letters in 1907. Some notable titles out of the 28 books and numerous short stories, sketches and letters Twain wrote are A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), The American Claimant (1892) and Following The Equator (1897).

On April 21, 1910, Mark Twain passed away leaving behind his legacy and writings which became an important part of world literature for forever.

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