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.