Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)

Novelist

Sources

A Missouri Boyhood . In the autumn of 1835 Americans looked up and marveled as Halley’s Comet—not due to reappear for another seventy-five years—illuminated the skies. On 30 November, as the comet passed overhead, a small-town lawyer, merchant, and real-estate developer named John Marshall Clemens welcomed a baby son into the world. John Clemens and his wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, had moved from place to place during the first twelve years of their marriage, settling in 1835 in the sleepy hamlet of Florida, Missouri. Young Samuel Langhorne Clemens joined a household that already included two older brothers, two older sisters, and a slave named Jenny. In 1839 the family moved thirty miles east to Hannibal, a bustling town of a thousand-odd residents. In this town perched on the banks of the Mississippi River, young Sam Clemens spent his childhood, absorbing the speech and spirit of antebellum life on the Mississippi.

The Young Journalist. The Clemens family suffered mixed fortunes during the future novelist’s boyhood. A sister died in 1839; a brother died in 1842; and John Clemens died in 1847—a crushing financial blow for the family. To help support his mother and remaining siblings, Sam worked at a series of odd jobs. All the while he continued to explore the great Mississippi: swimming, fishing, and even, with friends, discovering the drowned body of a fugitive slave. In 1848 young Clemens became an apprentice at the office of the Missouri Courier. Three years later he joined the staff of his brother Orion’s weekly, the Western Union. Jour-nalism served as Clemens’s introduction to a wider world. During the 1850s and into the 1860s he worked in various capacities for papers in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Nevada. During this same period he also worked as a riverboat pilot, a speculator, and a prospector. Clemens’s early journalism anticipates his later work in many respects: it showcases his biting humor, his zest for travel, and his fondness for pseudonyms, including W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Josh, and finally, in 1863, Mark Twain. The Innocents Abroad, a humorous account of Clemens’s 1867 travels in Europe and the Middle East, received excellent reviews when it was pub-lished in 1869 and became a best-seller. The following year the western author married an eastern heiress, I Olivia Louise (Livy) Langdon of Elmira, New York. During the 1870s and 1880s Clemens continued to craft a distinctive, multifaceted identity that combined the panache of the East with the vitality—and occasional rough edges—of the West. As Mark Twain, he became the preeminent American humorist of the late nineteenth century.

Literary Achievement. Twain’s early works include “Roughing If (1872), a western travelogue; The Gilded Age (1873), a satiric novel written with his friend Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900); and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), another best-seller whose mischievous protagonist has charmed generations of young readers. He went on to write A Tramp Abroad (1880), further impressions of Europe gleaned during an 1878-1879 tour of the Continent; The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a historical fable set in sixteenth-century England; and Life on the Mississippi (1883), based on Clemens’s experiences as a riverboat pilot. All the while, Clemens continued to travel, to publish sketches and stories in the popular press, and to cultivate prominent literary and political friends. One close friend, William Dean Howells, offered editorial advice as Clemens labored over drafts of a new novel. This book, originally conceived in 1876 as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, had languished for years as Twain tinkered with other writing projects. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, finally published in 1884 in Great Britain and in the United States the following year, did indeed feature the scamp Tom Sawyer. But in Tom’s friend Huck, Twain created a character who transcended the ranks of juvenile fiction. More worldly than Tom, and yet possessed of an essential idealism, Huck Finn is the quintessential American hero.

Huck Finn, American Iconoclast. Traveling down the Mississippi toward freedom on a raft, Huck and the fugitive slave Jim encounter an array of colorful characters during their quest for freedom. In a pivotal scene, when authorities post a large reward for Jim’s return, Huck is forced to weigh “the law” against more complex standards of justice. “I see Jim before me all the time,” Huck reflects: “in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.” Although he has already drafted a letter telling Jim’s owner of the slave’s whereabouts, Huck pauses before taking further action: “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, Eli go to hell.’” At this decisive moment—and again at the end of the book, when he determines to “light out for the territory” rather than be “sivilized” — Huck takes a stand as an American iconoclast, a self-willed outcast from proper society.

Adrift in America. The man who coined the phrase “The Gilded Age” found himself increasingly at odds with the acquisitive culture of late-nineteenth-century America. Throughout the 1890s Twain’s reputation as a literary master grew, but debts—and doubts—accumulated. Darker overtones surface in Twain’s later works such as Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), a novel that comments on race, law, and humbug; “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” an essay denouncing American imperialism; and The Mysterious Stranger (begun in 1898, published posthumously in 1916), a meditation on the nature of evil. In an interview with The New York Times in 1905, Twain commented on the mixed blessings of literary fame: “My advice to the humorist who has been a slave to his reputation is never to be discouraged. I know it is painful to make an earnest statement of a heartfelt conviction and then observe the puzzled expression of the fatuous soul who is conscientiously searching his brain to see how he can possibly have failed to get the point of the joke. But say it again and maybe he’ll understand you. No man need be a humorist all his life.” Clemens’s wife had died in the summer of 1904, and he spent his final years in restless transit from Connecticut to New York, Europe, and Bermuda. He lived to see Halley’s Comet reappear in the heavens in early 1910; he died on 21 April at his home in Redding, Connecticut.

Sources

Louis J. Budd, Our Mark Twain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983);

Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).