Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Mark Twain pseud. of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910, American author, b. Florida, Mo. As humorist, narrator, and social observer, Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of humor, characterization, and realism, has been called the first (and sometimes the best) modern American novel.

Early Life and Works

After the death of his father in 1847, young Clemens was apprenticed to a printer in Hannibal, Mo., the Mississippi River town where he spent most of his boyhood. He first began writing for his brother's newspaper there, and later he worked as a printer in several major Eastern cities. In 1857, Clemens went to New Orleans on his way to make his fortune in South America, but instead he became a Mississippi River pilot—hence his pseudonym, "Mark Twain," which was the river call for a depth of water of two fathoms. The Civil War put an end to river traffic, and in 1862 Clemens went west to Carson City, Nev., where he failed in several get-rich-quick schemes. He eventually began writing for the Virginia City Examiner and later was a newspaperman in San Francisco.

Soon the humorist "Mark Twain" emerged, a writer of tall tales and absurd anecdotes. He first won fame with the comic masterpiece "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press and later (1867) used as the title piece for a volume of stories and sketches. When he returned from a trip to Hawaii financed by the Sacramento Union in 1866, Twain became a successful humorous lecturer. The articles he wrote on a journey to the Holy Land were published in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., and settled down in Hartford, Conn., to be "respectable," although Roughing It (1872) presented anecdotes of his less genteel past on the Western frontier.

Mature Works

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 The 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; and the nonfictional Life on the Mississippi (1883). He also produced a travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which satirical overtones reflect a profound seriousness.

Later Life and Works

Some of Twain's later works are forced attempts at humor— The American Claimant (1892) and two sequels to Tom Sawyer. His distinctly bitter Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) underscores his increasingly melancholy attitude. Over the years Twain had invested a great deal of money in unsuccessful printing and publishing ventures, and in 1893 he found himself deeply in debt. To recoup his losses he wearily lectured his way around the world, being funny at whatever cost, and recording his experiences in Following the Equator (1897).

His later life was shadowed by the deaths of two of his daughters and by the long illness and death in 1904 of his wife. Some critics think that the fierce pessimism of his later works derives from these tragedies. Whatever the reason, he abandoned the optimistic tone of The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and wrote such somber works as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), What Is Man? (1905), 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 Masterpiece: Huckleberry Finn

Twain's literary reputation rests most particularly on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 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 authentic vernacular speech he revolutionized the language of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American writers. In 1990 a handwritten manuscript of the first half of the novel was discovered that includes a number of minor changes and an episode that was left out of the original published version; these passages were included in an edition published in 1996.

Bibliography

See his collected letters, ed. by E. M. Branch et al. (1987); his correspondence with William Dean Howells, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (1967); his notebooks, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (3 vol., 1975-80); his autobiography, ed. by C. Neider (1959); biographies by J. Kaplan (1966, repr. 2003), A. Hoffman (1997), F. Kaplan (2003), and R. Powers (2005); studies by W. D. Howells (1910), B. De Voto (1932), H. N. Smith (1967), V. W. Brooks (rev. ed. 1933, repr. 1970), and W. Gibson (1976); F. Anderson and K. M. Sanderson, ed., Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage (1972).

Twain, Mark (1835–1910) US writer, journalist, and lecturer, b. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He took his pseudonym from the sounding calls of steamboatmen on the Mississippi, on the banks of which he was brought up. Twain was among the first to write novels in the American vernacular, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which is seen as one of the great works of US fiction. Although he tends to be categorized as a humorist, his later books, such as The Mysterious Stranger (1916), are often bitter and pessimistic.

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (1835–1910), born in Florida, Mo., was the son of a Virginian imbued with the frontier spirit and grandiose dreams of easy wealth, who had married in Kentucky and spent the rest of his life in a restless search for profits from land speculation. The family settled in Hannibal, Mo. (1839), where Samuel grew up under the influence of this attitude, and passed the adventurous boyhood and youth that he recalls in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After his father's death (1847), he left school to be apprenticed to a printer, and was soon writing for his brother Orion's newspaper. He was a journeyman printer in the East and Middle West (1853–54), and in 1856 planned to seek his fortune in South America, but gave up this idea to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, a position that he considered the most important discipline of his life. When the Civil War began, the riverboats ceased operation, and, after a brief trial of soldiering with a group of Confederate volunteers, Clemens went to Nevada with his brother, who had been appointed secretary to the governor. In Roughing It he describes the trip west and his subsequent adventures as miner and journalist. After he joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (1862), he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, by which he was thereafter known, and began his career as a journalistic humorist in the frontier tradition. His articles of the time are collected in Mark Twain of the Enterprise (1957).

During this period he met Artemus Ward and others who encouraged his work, collaborated with Bret Harte in San Francisco, and wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” sketch (1865), which won him immediate recognition. He increased his popularity with letters and lectures about his trip to the Sandwich Islands, went east to lecture, published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), and made the tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land that he describes in The Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous narrative that assured his position as a leading author and shows his typical American irreverence for the classic and the antique. In 1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon, with whom he settled in Hartford, Conn. The effect of this marriage upon his career has been responsible for two divergent interpretations of his work. Mrs. Clemens belonged to a genteel, conservative society, and it has been claimed (mainly by Van Wyck Brooks) that the puritanical and materialistic surroundings into which Clemens was thrust frustrated his potential creative force for fierce revolt and satire. Others (principally Bernard De Voto) posit the idea that Clemens began as a frontier humorist and storyteller, and that his later work shows the unthwarted development of these essential talents.

In Roughing It (1872) he continues the method of The Innocents Abroad, seasoning the realistic account of adventure with humorous exaggerations in his highly personal idiom. Next he collaborated with C.D. Warner in The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel of post‐Civil War boom times that gave a name to the era. A Tramp Abroad (1880) is another travel narrative, this time of a walking trip through the Black Forest and the Alps. England during the reign of Edward VI is the scene of The Prince and the Pauper (1882), while A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is a realistic‐satirical fantasy of Arthurian England. During this period, however, Clemens was dealing with the background of his own early life in what are generally considered the most significant of his characteristically American works. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) he presents a nostalgic tale of boyish adventure in a Mississippi town and the Valley; and in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) he celebrates the flowering of Mississippi Valley frontier civilization, in terms of its own pungent tall talk and picaresque adventure.

External events soon interfered with the even flow of Clemens's creative activity. During his residence in Hartford, he had been a partner in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company, which reaped a fortune through the sale of Grant's Memoirs and Clemens's own writings, but bad publishing ventures and the investment of $200,000 in an unperfected typesetting machine drove him into bankruptcy (1894). To discharge his debts he made a lecturing tour of the world, although he had come to dislike lecturing, and the record of this tour, Following the Equator (1897), has an undercurrent of bitterness not found in his earlier travel books. During this decade, although he wrote The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), most of his work is uneven in quality, and The American Claimant (1892), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) are feeble echoes of earlier work. In 1898 he finished paying off his debts, but his writings show that the strain of pessimism he formerly repressed was now dominating his mind. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), What Is Man? (1906), and The Mysterious Stranger (1916) demonstrate this attitude. He continued to travel widely, lectured and wrote articles on contemporary events and such controversial works as Christian Science (1907) and Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), but his bitterness was deepened by the loss of his wife and two daughters. His pessimism was perhaps no more profound than the optimism of his own Colonel Sellers, but his feeling that it was too mordant for publication caused him to instruct that certain of his works be published posthumously.

Since 1906 he had been engaged in dictating his autobiography to his secretary, A.B. Paine, who later became the first Literary Editor of the Mark Twain Estate, and issued a collection of Letters (1917), the authorized biography (3 vols., 1912), and the Autobiography (1924). The second editor, Bernard De Voto, edited volumes of materials from the papers left by Clemens, including Letters from the Earth (1963). Drawing on the same sources, the third editor, Dixon Wecter, collected The Love Letters of Mark Twain (1949); and the fourth editor, Henry Nash Smith, edited with William M. Gibson, Mark Twain–Howells Letters (2 vols., 1960). A scholarly edition of his Works began publication by the University of California Press in 1972, which also began issuing (1967) a scholarly edition of his previously unpublished Papers, most of whose originals are in the University's Bancroft Library.

An important early estimate of his work is My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (1910), by his friend and adviser Howells. The prevalent critical attitude has come to consider Clemens's most distinctive work as summing up the tradition of Western humor and frontier realism. Beginning as a journalist, he assumed the method and point of view of popular literature in the U.S., maintaining the personal anecdotal style that he used also in his capacity of comic lecturer. In travel books, he digresses easily from factual narrative to humorous exaggeration and burlesque. The novels are episodic or autobiographical, and not formed by any larger structural concepts. He wrote in the authentic native idiom, exuberantly and irreverently, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude. The romantic idealism of Joan of Arc, the bitter satire of feudal tyranny in A Connecticut Yankee, the appreciation of human values in Huckleberry Finn, and the sense of epic sweep in Life on the Mississippi establish Clemens's place in American letters as an artist of broad understanding and vital, although uneven and sometimes misdirected, achievement.