A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Mark Twain [pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910). American writer, journalist, humorist, narrator, and social observer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He is also known for his quotations. Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature." Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835, the sixth child born to Jane Lampton (1803-1890) and John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847), a Tennessee country merchant. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825–December 11, 1897) and Henry (July 13, 1838–June 21, 1858) and his sister Pamela (September 19, 1827–August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830–August 17, 1839) died when Twain was four years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832–May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months. When Twain was four, in 1839, his family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing. In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia and the family was left in financial straits, so Twain left school and obtained his first of many jobs working with various newspapers and magazines including the Hannibal Courier as journeyman printer. He also started writing, among his first stories “A Gallant Fireman” (1851) and “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter ” (1852). After traveling to and working in New York and Philadelphia for a few years he moved back to St. Louis in 1857. It was here that the lure of the elegant steamboats and festive crowds drew his attention and he became an apprentice ‘cub’ river pilot under Horace Bixby, earning his license in 1858. As a successful pilot plying his trade between St. Louis and New Orleans, Twain also grew to love the second longest river in the world which he describes affectionately in his memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883). An important part of a river pilot’s craft is knowing the waters and depths, which, for the mighty Mississippi and her reefs, snags, and mud are ever changing. To ‘mark twain’ is to sound the depths and deem them safe for passage, the term adopted by Clemens as his pen name in 1863. In 1858 his brother Henry died in an explosion on the steamboat Pennsylvania. With the outbreak of Civil War in 1861 passage on the Mississippi was limited, so at the age of twenty-six Twain moved on from river life to the high desert valley in the silver mining town of Carson City, Nevada with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. He had never traveled out of the state but was excited to venture forth on the stagecoach in the days before railways, described in his semi-autobiographical novel Roughing It (1872). Twain tried his hand at mining on Jackass Hill in California in 1864, and also began a prolific period of reporting for numerous publications including the Territorial Enterprise, The Alta Californian, San Francisco Morning Call, Sacramento Union and The Galaxy. He traveled to various cities in America, met Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens in New York, and visited various countries in Europe, Hawaii, and the Holy Land. Mark Twain’s first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, and later (1867) used as the title piece for a volume of stories and sketches. The only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West. In 1866 Twain visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip. He then set out world tour, travelling in France and Italy. Twain recorded his experiences on a collection of travel letters called The Innocents Abroad (1869). The work, which gained him wide popularity, poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. Throughout his life, Twain frequently returned to travel writing - many of his finest novels, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), dealt with journeys and escapes into freedom. Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon (1845-1904); Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York. They had four children. Three died before they reached their twenties but Clara (1870-1962) lived to the age of eighty-eight. In 1871, Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. In Hartford, Twain wrote some of his best work: The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel written with Charles Dudley Warner about materialism and corruption in the 1870s; two evocations of his boyhood in Hannibal, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); The Prince and the Pauper (1882), a novel for children that blends the simplicity of a fairy tale with realistic social criticism. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship. Life on the Mississippi (1883) contained an attack on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticism have caused according to Twain 'measureless harm' to progressive ideas. From the very beginning of his journalistic career, Twain made fun with the novel and its tradition. Although Twain enjoyed magnificent popularity as a novelist, he believed that he lacked the analytical sensibility necessary to the novelist's art. He also produced a travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. In this book Twain reflect a profound friendship with pioneering inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla and interest in scientific inventions. Twain also continued to uphold a busy lecture series throughout the United States. In 1888 he was awarded an honorary Master of Art degree from Yale University. Twain’s novel The American Claimant (1892) was followed by The Tragedy of Pudd'Nhead Wilson (1894), first serialized in Century Magazine. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) was followed by Tom Sawyer, Detective in 1896. His favourite fiction novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) was first serialised in Harper’s Magazine. By 1895, unable to control his debts, he set off on a world lecture tour to Australia, Canada, Ceylon, India, New Zealand, and South Africa to pay them off. Following the Equator (1897) is his travelogue based on his tour, during which he met Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, and Booker T. Washington. With another successful lecture tour under his belt and now much admired and celebrated for his literary efforts, Mark, Livy and their daughter Jane settled in New York City. Yale University bestowed upon him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 1901. The same year A Horse's Tale and Christian Science (1907) were published. Twain passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. While traveling in Italy in 1904, Livy died in Florence. His daughter Jane became very sick and was committed to an institution, but died in 1909 of an epileptic seizure. Some critics think that the fierce pessimism of his later works derives from these tragedies. Whatever the reason, he abandoned the optimistic tone of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and wrote such somber works as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), What Is Man? (1906), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and Letters from the Earth (1962). The strange contradiction in personality between the genial humorist and the declared misanthrope has long intrigued commentators and makes Twain a fascinating biographical subject. Twain’s literary reputation rests most particularly on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an American Odysseus, that was first considered adult fiction. In its hero, a resourceful, unconventional boy with an innate sense of human values, Twain created one of the most memorable characters in fiction. The narrative device of a raft carrying Huck and a runaway slave down the Mississippi enabled Twain to achieve a realistic portrait of American life in the 19th cent. Through his use of his native Missouri dialect and following the twists and turns of ordinary speech he revolutionized the language of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American writers. In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Some archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain’s humor and the flow of the book. Oxford University awarded him an Doctorate of Literature in 1907. Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he spent much of it in bad investments, mostly in new inventions. He was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. Twain inventions included a bed clamp for infants, a new type of steam engine, and the kaolatype (or collotype, a machine designed to engrave printing plates). While Twain credited Henry Rogers, a Standard Oil executive, with saving him from financial ruin, their close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial. Although Twain remained neutral during the Civil War, his views became more radical as he grew older. Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and emancipation, and argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States. Twain was opposed to vivisection of any kind, not on a scientific basis but rather an ethical one. He was a vegetarian, and stated that no sentient being should be made to suffer for another without consent. In 1908 Twain had moved to his home ‘Stormfield’ in Redding, Connecticut, though he still actively traveled, especially to Bermuda. Mark Twain died on 21 April 1910 in Redding, Connecticut and now rests in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York State, buried beside her and the children. |
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