Mark Twain

American writer

• Born: November 30, 1835
• Birthplace: Florida, Missouri
• Died: April 21, 1910
• Place of death: Redding, Connecticut

Twain gave the world one of its enduring children’s classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, gave America the prototypical initiation novel. However, as he approached the end of his life, his humor and nostalgia for the past increasingly gave way to his pessimism about humanity’s technological progress.

Early Life

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was the sixth of seven children of Jane (née Jane Lampton) and John Marshall Clemens. His ancestors on both sides were mostly English and Irish who had lived in Virginia and Kentucky. Although both sides of his family claimed distinguished English ancestors, those aristocratic ties were never clearly identified, and the Clemens family was anything but affluent when Samuel was born. Nevertheless, Samuel’s father was a cultivated, educated man (he had studied law) who was determined to be successful financially. Consequently, because there appeared to be more opportunity, in 1839 the elder Clemens moved his family to Hannibal, located on the banks of the Mississippi.

John Clemens’s financial dreams never materialized, and he died in 1847, when Samuel was eleven. Partly by default and partly because of her personality, Jane Clemens became a central influence in Samuel’s life. In fact, the similarities between his mother and Olivia Langdon, his wife, were so pronounced that one could speculate that his mother’s influence subconsciously affected his choice of a wife.

Shortly after his father’s death, Samuel, probably for financial reasons, was apprenticed to a local printer, and his newspaper career was launched. In 1850, he went to work for his older brother, Orion, on the Hannibal Western Union, and until 1857, he worked as a typesetter for various newspapers. During this period, he also wrote sketches and published his first story. His newspaper career was fortuitously interrupted in 1857, when he learned to be a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. Those experiences formed the basis for his Life on the Mississippi (1883) and also deepened the influence that the Mississippi had on the body of his work. In 1862, he first used the pen name “Mark Twain,” taken from the river boatmen’s cry to indicate two fathoms of safe water. When the outbreak of the Civil War brought his piloting career to an end, Twain served briefly with some Confederate “irregulars,” but he gladly accepted Orion’s offer to accompany him to Nevada, where Orion served as “secretary” to that territory.

During his Nevada years, Twain unsuccessfully prospected for gold and silver and successfully returned to the newspaper world, writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, where he developed, partly through emulating humorist Artemus Ward, his lecturing persona. In 1864, he moved to San Francisco, where he continued his newspaper work on the Morning Call and also contributed work to the Californian, a literary magazine. Among his California works was “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a short story that catapulted him to national prominence and established him as a spokesperson for the vanishing American frontier. After a trip to Hawaii, about which he wrote and lectured, he left California in 1866 and went east to were chosen.

Life’s Work

Twain’s decision to go east was a significant one. Despite his “frontier” humor and southern speech, he became an easterner who looked nostalgically to the South for his literary landscape and to the West for his values. In effect, Twain was split between the progressive, materialistic East of the future and the reactionary, individualistic Southwest of the past. Even Twain’s appearance seemed a contradiction: A handsome man given to elegant clothes (white suits became his trademark in his later years), he was also a cigar smoker and whiskey drinker who never became “genteel” in manner. Far from subscribing to the notion of “art for art’s sake,” he made writing his business and was ambitious both financially and socially. In fact, it was the split between art and business that produced works that appear inconsistent, contradictory, and careless. The pressure to make money did cause him to produce inferior work, as Twain himself acknowledged.

Shortly after moving to New York, Twain met Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent preacher and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). When he learned that Beecher’s congregation was planning a Mediterranean steamboat excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, he persuaded the Alta California to finance his trip in exchange for providing the newspaper with travel letters, which were popular at the time. The revised travel accounts eventually became The Innocents Abroad (1869), a book that enabled him to abandon his newspaper work and to devote his full attention to writing. The trip was also significant because it resulted in his marriage, in 1870, to Olivia Langdon, whose brother had met Twain on the voyage and had showed the author Olivia’s picture. During their thirty-three years of marriage, Olivia was the ideal wife and confidante, but she also served as an unofficial “editor” whose moral views tempered Twain’s writing.

After his marriage, Twain embarked on what was to become a typical divided course of action: He began to write Roughing It (1872), and he acquired part ownership of the Buffalo Express, the first of a series of unsuccessful business ventures. Another pattern was also established during the early years of the marriage: depression caused by sickness and death. Olivia’s father died in 1870; Olivia herself was sick and gave birth prematurely to their first child, Langdon, who died in 1872. Despite these setbacks, Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where he built an impressive mansion, a symbol of his ambition and materialism.

Twain’s Hartford years were his most productive artistically and financially. In 1873, he published, in collaboration with his Hartford neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age , his first attempt at an extended work of fiction. After successfully adapting the novel to the stage (1874), he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and, in 1880, published another travel book, A Tramp Abroad . In 1882, The Prince and the Pauper appeared, and in 1884, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , his most artistic and significant novel, was published. Within a month, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was embroiled in censorship problems that continued to plague the novel, but the novel also quickly became a best seller and has become one of the most widely read and taught novels in American literature.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the first publication of the Charles L. Webster and Company, which Twain formed after having problems with his previous publishers. Like his father, Twain believed that he had business acumen, and the financial success of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885-1886), which Twain’s company published, confirmed his belief that he was both a financial and artistic genius. In 1886, an overconfident Twain, who optimistically believed in technology and in the promise of a typesetting machine, acquired half ownership of the Paige Typesetter; in 1889, he purchased all rights to the machine.

By the time Twain ended his futile speculation in the ill-fated invention during the early 1890’s, he had accumulated debts of $100,000. In an effort to economize, he closed his Hartford house in 1891 and moved to Europe, but he was bankrupt by 1894. Even his substantial earnings from the publication of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) could not compensate for the financial strain caused by his obsession with the typesetting machine.

To his credit, Twain did not attempt to take advantage of bankruptcy laws and instead set about paying off his debts by undertaking an exhausting round-the-world lecture tour in 1895 and by continuing to publish books: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), and Following the Equator (1897), a travel account prompted by his 1895 lecture tour. These sales, coupled with a lucrative contract with Harper and Row for rights to his collected works, enabled Twain to pay off his debts in full by January of 1898. Although he recovered financially, Twain suffered several setbacks from which he never fully recovered. While he was in England in 1896, his favorite daughter died of meningitis; his already frail wife died in 1904, after suffering from physical and mental problems; his daughter Clara married and settled in Europe in 1909; and Jean, his other daughter, died scarcely two months after Clara’s marriage.

Despite the misfortunes that plagued him after 1898, Twain continued to write prolifically, but most of this material, because of its nihilistic philosophy, was not published until after his death. Olivia, who was concerned about his image and who served as his literary editor/censor, opposed the publication of the deterministic tract What Is Man? (1906). “The Mysterious Stranger” stories, which occupied Twain for several years and took a variety of forms, were not published in any form until 1916, when Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s official biographer, and a Harper’s editor conflated Twain’s versions and published their reconstruction as Twain’s own work. The fact that the 1916 publication was, in effect, an editorial fraud was not publicly known until decades later.

Twain, who had been left quite alone by Clara’s marriage and the deaths of his wife and other children, died April 21, 1910, long before the American public had been made aware of the “literary Lincoln’s” darker side.

Significance

In many ways, Mark Twain was as contradictory a person as his real name and pen name suggest. The adoption of the pen name indicates, to some extent, a person not content with himself but determined to forge a new personality, to create a new person—in effect, not unlike James Gatz/Jay Gatsby, to be both creator and creature. Like Gatsby, too, Twain was caught up in the American dream of material success, social ascent, and technological progress; unlike Gatsby, however, he came to satirize and scorn many of the values to which he subscribed.

For most Americans, Mark Twain is indelibly associated with Huckleberry Finn, the youthful protagonist who “lights out for the Territory” rather than return to the “civilization” represented by Aunt Sally. However, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains another juvenile persona who only “plays” at nonconformity and rebellion: Tom Sawyer. There is as much Tom Sawyer in Twain as there is Huckleberry Finn. Even Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is more than it appears to be, juvenile fiction in the vein of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; it is also an initiation novel that depicts a boy’s adventures and his inner growth, presents the conflict between appearance and reality, and satirizes southern gentility and aristocratic pretension. Because Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is such an enjoyable story, however, many readers ignored the Colonel Sherburn incident, with its scathing indictment of humankind. For many readers, Mark Twain was the lecturer-writer of juvenile fiction and travel books, a humorous teller of frontier tales.

Twain’s humor was considerably blacker than the general public—which lionized him—believed. In some ways, his humor was similar to Ambrose Bierce’s, but that similarity was overlooked by a public that dubbed the latter “Bitter Bierce.” As his ambitious entrepreneurial schemes failed and his loved ones died, Twain became increasingly pessimistic about people and about institutions, and his later works are marked by pessimism, determinism, and nihilism.

Although Twain was nostalgic about the innocence of children, the children in The Mysterious Stranger are light-years away from Tom and Huck. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court provides yet another example of public unwillingness to confront the complexity that was Twain. Twain’s novel satirizes the institutions, particularly chivalry and the Church, of medieval England, which is juxtaposed to turn-of-the-century America, represented by Hank Morgan, a believer in progress and technology. Morgan’s well-intentioned technology, however, ultimately produces only death. When Twain’s novel was adapted to film, it was bowdlerized into a musical starring Bing Crosby.

Twain was very much a product of his age. As a spokesperson for an already vanishing frontier, he lampooned the pretense and the institutions of the East while he yearned for the lost values of youth and individualism. These nineteenth century values were in conflict with the twentieth century technology he first embraced and then, like Henry Adams, came to despise.

Bibliography

Burns, Ken, Dayton Duncan, and Geoffrey C. Ward. Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Lavishly illustrated companion volume to a four-hour PBS television documentary on Twain.

Camfield, Gregg, ed. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Collection of alphabetically arranged essays on a wide variety of subjects by Camfield and several guest contributors.

Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Biography of Twain emphasizing the chronological development of his literary work, with useful discussions of individual writings.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Personal explorations of the complex interactions between Twain’s literary heritage and modern American culture, with particular attention to Hannibal’s slave history.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Controversial study that examines African American cultural influence on Huckleberry Finn, particularly in Huck’s spoken language.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Collection of original articles on such topics as religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Includes a bibliographical essay.

Horn, Jason Gary. Mark Twain: A Descriptive Guide to Biographical Sources. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999. Useful and comparatively up-to-date summary of the most important works on Twain. Emphasis is on biographical sources, but works of literary criticism are covered as well.

Kaplan, Fred. The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Revisionist biography that seeks to merge the “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens” personas into a singular whole. Describes Twain’s personality, foibles, and evolution as a writer.

Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that covers Twain’s life from the time he left piloting on the Mississippi to his death. Remains the starting point for any serious study of Twain.

LeMaster, J. R., and James D. Wilson, eds. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1993. Containing signed articles written by nearly two hundred scholars, this comprehensive reference differs from Rasmussen’s Mark Twain A to Z in focusing more on literary topics.

Ober, K. Patrick. Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Physician’s study of the role of medicine in Twain’s life and writings that reveals many other dimensions of Twain’s life.

Rasmussen, R. Kent. Mark Twain A to Z. New York: Facts On File, 1995. Comprehensive reference on Twain’s life and writings with detailed entries on most of the people, places, and events that figured in Twain’s complex life. A substantially expanded and revised edition was scheduled to be published in 2006 as Critical Companion to Mark Twain.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mark Twain for Kids. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. Well-illustrated biography containing educational activities. Written for younger readers, but older readers will find it a clear and useful summary of Twain’s life.