Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain (1835–1910), author.Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the hamlet of Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a thriving commercial town on the
Mississippi River. His father, a slave owner and justice of the peace, went bankrupt as a shopkeeper and land speculator. Young Samuel ended his formal schooling at the age of twelve and at seventeen left home for good. His imagination, however, continued to dwell in Hannibal and along the river and ultimately created the most memorable boyhood in American literature. He served as an itinerant typesetter, a river pilot (fulfilling a boyhood ambition), a Confederate irregular (for a grim two weeks) in the
Civil War, and a prospector and journalist in the Nevada territory and
California.
In 1865, at the age of thirty, Clemens published his first nationally recognized story, then titled
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He had finally settled on his vocation, describing it in a letter to his brother Orion as “seriously scribbling to excite the
laughter of God's creatures.” As a sign and instrument of this new purpose he took the public identity “Mark Twain” (a pseudonym derived from the river leadsman's call meaning twelve feet of navigable depth), although, as he soon discovered, this public identity laid claims on him to be a professional funny man that often collided with the private imperatives of Samuel Clemens.
Just turned thirty‐one, he left California to seek fame and fortune in the East. His first success,
The Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous and satirical travel book based on a summer‐long excursion to Europe and the Middle East, sold an estimated 100,000 copies in its first two years, a considerable figure for the time. A major attraction on the lecture circuit and part owner of a Buffalo, New York, newspaper, he completed his transition from sagebrush bohemianism to respectability by his 1870 marriage to Olivia Langdon, daughter of an upstate New York coal baron. They moved from Buffalo to Hartford, Connecticut, where, with Harriet Beecher Stowe as neighbor, he built for his growing family an extravagant, eye‐catching mansion that saw two decades of domestic happiness.
With essayist and
Hartford Courant editor Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens collaborated on a topical novel,
The Gilded Age (1873), the title of which supplied an enduring label for the post–
Civil War era.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) prepared the way for his masterpiece,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), a classic of world literature. No other American work has been so highly praised for its originality and brilliance— Ernest
Hemingway called it “the best book we've had”—or so widely abused, for its ironic, at times ambivalent treatment of the refractory issues of race and
slavery, its use of the racial slur “nigger,” and its controversial plot resolution.
Roughing It (1872),
A Tramp Abroad (1880), and
Life on the Mississippi (1883) helped consolidate Clemens's reputation. He was an international literary celebrity as much at home in London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin as in Hartford and New York.
Clemens's considerable prosperity, derived from book sales and fees from lectures and readings, allowed him to live and entertain on the scale of a merchant prince. But it also tempted him into business ventures—a publishing house and an automatic typesetting machine—that promised greater wealth but in 1894 bankrupted him. His 1889 novel
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was a turning point in his faith in progress,
technology, and his confidence in himself as a writer. A later novel, the somber
Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), dealt once again with the subject of race and blood in America. To pay his debts and recoup his fortunes, he traveled in 1895–1896 to Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa on a round‐the‐world lecture tour that also supplied material for his final travel book,
Following the Equator (1897). His business reverses together with the death (in 1896) of his favorite daughter, Susy, had put an end to the Hartford idyll. At times he believed that his rags‐to‐riches, obscurity‐to‐fame history, which reminded his friend William Dean
Howells of
The Arabian Nights, had been only a dream, from which he awakened to the reality of failure.
Restored to financial health with the aid of Standard Oil tycoon Henry H. Rogers, Mark Twain after a period of self‐exile returned to the United States in 1900 and to public celebrity that continued to his death. He was as conspicuous for his cigars and white suits, shock of white hair, and Fifth Avenue promenades as for his ability to express a quotable opinion on virtually any topic. In addition to autobiography, the literary form he found most congenial in his final years was the polemic. These he directed against orthodox religion, Mary Baker Eddy's
Christian Science, William Shakespeare, imperialism,
racism,
lynching, patriotism, the martial spirit, and conventional wisdom in general. Such late works as
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900),
What Is Man? (1906), and
The Mysterious Stranger (published 1916) reveal the depth of his pessimism. He died in Redding, Connecticut, at an Italianate villa built with proceeds from his serialized autobiography.
Mark Twain's life and career bridge the eras of the
Pony Express and the motor car, the river raft and the steam yacht, the open frontier and the modern metropolis. The twenty‐nine volumes of his collected works demonstrate the latitude of the designation “author.” He wrote novels, short stories, travel books, humorous and satirical sketches, social and literary commentary, essays, philosophic argument, autobiography, speeches, and polemics. Almost as many volumes have been devoted to publishing his letters, notebooks, journalism, fugitive pieces, stage plays, and poetry. What unifies this half‐century‐long body of work is a dazzling and dominating authorial personality together with a distinctive voice, stance, and style—at once quizzical, celebratory, lyric, vernacular, ironic, and unmistakably native—that have influenced American writing ever since.
See also
Gilded Age;
Literature: Civil War to World War I.Bibliography
William Dean Howells , My Mark Twain, 1910.
Albert Bigelow Paine , Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols., 1912.
James M. Cox , Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, 1966.
Justin Kaplan , Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 1966.
Jeffrey Steinbrink , Getting to Be Mark Twain, 1991.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin , Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African‐American Voices, 1993.
Justin Kaplan
