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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by
the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer.
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. He is also
known for his quotations. During his lifetime, Clemens became a friend to
presidents, artists, leading industrialists and European royalty.
Clemens 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."
 Young
Life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835 to a
Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798–March 24, 1847),
and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803–October 27, 1890).
He was the sixth of seven children. 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 Samuel 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 Samuel was four,
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 Samuel became familiar with the institution of
slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.
In March 1847, when Samuel was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The following
year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter
and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a
newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked
as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. At 22,
Clemens returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the
steamboat pilot, "Bixby," inspired Clemens to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot;
it was a richly rewarding profession with wages set at $250 per month ($155,000
today).
Because the steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no
lamps were allowed, making night travel a precarious endeavor. A steamboat pilot
needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the
hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Clemens meticulously studied
2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he
received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. While training for his pilot's
license, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him on the
Mississippi. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working
on exploded. Samuel was guilt-stricken over his brother's death and held himself
responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river
and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and
traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.
Travels and
family
Missouri was a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, but it
did not join the Confederacy. When the war began, Clemens and his friends formed a
Confederate militia (depicted in an 1885 short story, "The Private History of a
Campaign That Failed"), which drilled for only two weeks before disbanding. Clemens
joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial
governor of Nevada, and headed west.
Clemens and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake
City along the way. These experiences became the basis of the book Roughing It, and
provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Clemens'
journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a
miner. Clemens failed as a miner and and found work at a Virginia City newspaper,
the Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel
account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with
"Mark Twain".
Clemens then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued as a
journalist and began lecturing. He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus
Ward and Dan DeQuille. An assignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first
lectures. In 1867, a local newspaper funded a steamboat trip to the Mediterranean
region. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular
collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.
He also met Charles Langdon and saw a picture of Langdon's sister Olivia. Clemens
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. Olivia gave birth to
a son, Langdon, who died of diphtheria after 19 months. Clemens lived in Buffalo,
New York from 1869 to 1871, where he owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and
worked as an editor and writer. He sold his stake in the newspaper and moved to
Elmira, New York in 1871.
In 1872, Clemens moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut. There Olivia gave birth
to three daughters: Susy Clemens, Clara Clemens (c1875-1962) , and Jean Clemens.
Clemens also became good friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.
Clemens made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad.
His tour included a visit to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest
of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Clemens wrote of
Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated,
with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life
delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world ." He
returned to America in 1900, having paid off his debts to his old firm. The
Clemens' marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904.
In 1906, Clemens began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford
University issued him a Doctorate of Literature a year later.
Clemens outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression,
which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's
death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.
Life as a
writer
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. 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.
After this burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to
write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his
first of which was to ride the steamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii,
referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the
genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, which
designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York
City via the Panama isthmus. All the while Twain was writing letters meant for
publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On
June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City for five months.
This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress.
“ This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn
scientific expedition it would have about it the gravity, that profundity, and that
impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and
withal so attractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has
a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe
and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those
who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone
how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea – other books do that,
and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need. ”
In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a
semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's
journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons
American and Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various
countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work would kept Roughing It's
focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled The
Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books
had been, and it was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable
because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles
Dudley Warner.
Clemens' next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times
on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875,
featured Twain’s disillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the
starting point for Life on the Mississippi.
Clemens' next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his
youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Samuel 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
Clemens' boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.
The Prince and the Pauper, despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and
literature today, was not as well received. Pauper was Twain’s first attempt at
fiction, and blame for its shortcomings are usually put on Twain having not been
experienced enough in English society and the fact that it was produced after such
a massive hit. In between the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had problems completing) and started and
completed another travel book, A Tramp Abroad. A Tramp Abroad follows Twain as he
travels through central and southern Europe.
Twain’s next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him
as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American
Novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone
than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s
belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that
it was wrong. The book has become required reading in many schools throughout the
United States because Huck ignores the rules and mores of the age to follow what he
thinks is just (the story takes place in the 1850s where slavery is present). Four
hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in the summer of 1876,
right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven
years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in
1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Finn in tandem with The Prince and the
Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of Finn is subject
to much controversy. Some say that Twain experiences—as critic Leo Marx puts it—a
"failure of nerve." Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: “If you read
it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real
end. The rest is just cheating.”
Near the end of Huckleberry Finn, Twain had written Life on the Mississippi, which
is said to have heavily influenced the former book. The work recounts Twain’s
memories and new experiences after a 22 year absence from the Mississippi. The book
is of note because Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.
After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them
afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his
writing projects. Twain focused on the writing of President Ulysses S. Grant's
Memoirs for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write The
Private History of a Campaign That Failed for The Century Magazine.
Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured
him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. The tone
become cynical to the point of almost being a rant against the established
political system of the day (which would have been in King Arthur’s time), and
eventually devolved into madness for the main character. The book was started in
December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and
eventually finished in the spring of 1889.
Some say that this work marked the beginning of the end for Twain as he fell into
financial trouble and eschewed his humor vein. Twain had begun to furiously write
articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his
business intentions afloat, but it was not enough because he filed for bankruptcy
in 1894. His next large scale work, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (aka Those
Extraordinary Twins), brought about Twain’s sense of irony, though it has been
misconstrued. There were parallels between this work and Twain’s financial
failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a
different person.
Twain’s next venture was straight fiction called Personal Recollections of Joan of
Arc and dedicated it to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work he was
most proud of despite the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream
of Twain’s for a very long time, and he eventually thought it to be the work to
save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers,
squashed that idea and got Twain out of that business all together, but the book
was published nonetheless.
Twain’s wife died in 1904, and after the appropriate time Twain was allowed to
publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and censor throughout his life,
had looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which pits the
presence of Satan, aka “No. 44,” in various situations where the moral sense of
human kind. This particular work was not published in Twain’s life, so there were
three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal
version, the Eseldorf version, and the Print Shop version. Confusion between the
versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently
have the original versions as Twain wrote them become available.
Twain’s last work was his autobiography, 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.
Financial
matters
Clemens made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he spent much
of it in bad investments, mostly in new inventions. These included a bed clamp for
infants, a new type of steam engine, the kaolatype (or collotype: a machine
designed to engrave printing plates), and the Paige typesetting machine: a
beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but
was prone to breakdowns. Before it could be commercially perfected it was made
obsolete by the Linotype. Finally, there was his publishing house, which enjoyed
initial success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant but went bust soon after,
losing money on an ill-advised idea that the general public would be interested in
a Life of the Pope.
Clemens' writings and lectures combined with the help of a new friend enabled him
to recover financially. In 1893, he began a 15-year-long friendship with financier
Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil. Rogers first made Clemens
file for bankruptcy. Then Rogers had Clemens transfer copyrights to his written
works to his wife, Olivia, to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them.
Finally Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all the creditors were
paid. Twain then embarked on an around-the-world lecture tour to pay off his
creditors in full, despite the fact that he was no longer under any legal
obligation to do so.
A late life friendship for each, Mark Twain and Henry Huttleston Rogers in
1908.While Twain openly credited Henry Rogers with saving him from financial ruin,
their close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial. As Twain lost
3 out of 4 of his children, and his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon, before his death
in 1910, the Rogers family increasingly became Twain's own surrogate family. He
became a frequent guest at the Rogers' townhouse in New York City, their 48-room
summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and aboard the Rogers' steam yacht, the
Kanawha.
Twain was an admirer of the remarkable deaf and blind girl, Helen Keller. He first
met her and Anne Sullivan at a party in the home of Laurence Hutton in New York
City in the winter of 1894. Twain introduced them to Rogers, who with his wife,
paid for a college education for Keller at Radcliffe College. It was Twain who is
credited with labeling Sullivan, Helen's teacher, a "miracle worker." His choice of
words later became inspiration for the title of William Gibson's play and film
adaptation, The Miracle Worker.
Twain also introduced Rogers to journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who had grown up in the
western Pennsylvania oil regions where Rogers had begun his career during the
American Civil War. Beginning in 1902, she conducted detailed interviews with the
Standard Oil magnate. Rogers, wily and normally-guarded in matters related to
business and finance, may have been under the impression her work was to be
complimentary. He was apparently uncustomarily forthcoming. However, Tarbell's
interviews with Rogers formed the basis for her negative exposé of the nefarious
business practices of industrialist John D. Rockefeller and the massive Standard
Oil organization. Her work, which became known at the time as muckraking (and is
now known as investigative journalism), first ran as a series of articles,
presented in installments in McClure's Magazine, which were later published
together as a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904. Tarbell's
exposé fueled negative public sentiment against the company and was a contributing
factor in the U.S. government's antitrust legal actions against the Standard Oil
Trust which eventually led to the breakup of the petroleum conglomerate in
1911.
While the two famous old men were widely regarded as drinking and poker buddies,
they also exchanged letters when apart, and this was often since each traveled a
great deal. Unlike Rogers' personal files, which have never become public, these
interesting and insightful letters back and forth were published verbatim in an
entire book, Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909.
In the written exchanges between the two men, there are pleasant examples of
Rogers' sense of fun as well as Twain's well-known sense of humor. This provides a
rare insight into private side of "Hell Hound Rogers", who had a well-known public
reputation as a fearsome and ruthless robber baron.
On cruises aboard the Kanawha, they were joined at frequent intervals by Booker T.
Washington, the famed former slave who had become a leading educator. From all
outward appearances, Washington was apparently just another friend. However, known
but to a very few, in fact, through him, "Hell Hound Rogers" was a secret
philanthropist, aiding in educational efforts for African-Americans by deploying a
new concept which came to be known as anonymous donor matching funds to contribute
very large amounts of money in support of several teacher's colleges (now Hampton
University and Tuskegee University) and literally dozens of small schools in the
South over the same 15 year period of the Twain-Rogers friendship. (Dr. Washington
only revealed this situation in June 1909 just weeks after Rogers' death as he made
a pre-planned tour along the Virginian Railway, traveling in Rogers' private rail
car "Dixie").
In April 1907, Twain and Rogers cruised together to Virginia aboard the Kanawha to
the opening of the Jamestown Exposition, held at a site at Sewell's Point in a
rural section of Norfolk County, Virginia. Twain's public popularity was such that
large numbers of citizens paid to ride touring boats out to where the Kanawha was
anchored in Hampton Roads in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. As the gathering of
boats around the yacht became a safety hazard, he finally obliged by coming on deck
and waving to the crowds. Because of poor weather conditions, the steam yacht was
delayed for several days from leaving the Hampton Roads area and venturing into the
Atlantic Ocean. Rogers and some of the others in his party (without Twain) returned
to New York by rail. Because of his dislike of traveling by rail, Twain elected to
return aboard the Kanawha, despite the delay. However, the news media reporters
lost track of Twain's whereabouts; when he failed to return to New York City as
scheduled, the New York Times speculated that he might have been "lost at sea."
Upon arriving safely in New York and learning of this, the humorist wrote a
satirical article about the episode, including, in part,
"...I will make an exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at
sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious
public."
This bore similarities to an earlier event in 1897 when he made his famous (and
usually misquoted) remark "The report of my death is an exaggeration" in an
article, after a reporter was sent to investigate whether he had died (in fact it
was his cousin who was seriously ill).
Later that year, Twain and Rogers' son, Henry Jr. (Harry), returned to the
Jamestown Exposition aboard the Kanawha. The humorist helped host Robert Fulton Day
on September 23, 1907, celebrating the centennial of Fulton's invention of the
steamboat. Twain was filling in for ailing former U.S. President Grover Cleveland
and introduced Rear Admiral Purnell Harrington. According to a report published in
Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Twain was met with a full five minutes of
cheering and standing ovation. Members of the audience waved their hats and
umbrellas. Deeply touched, Twain said, "When you appeal to my head, I don't feel
it; but when you appeal to my heart, I do feel it."
Two years later, the two old friends again returned to Norfolk, Virginia. On April
3, 1909, the business community of Norfolk held a lavish banquet to honor Henry
Rogers and his newly completed Virginian Railway. Twain was the keynote speaker in
one of his last public appearances. His speech was widely quoted in newspapers
across the United States. On the same trip, while Rogers and associates went to
inspect his new coal pier near the mouth of the Elizabeth River at Sewell's Point,
Twain used the time to visit children in several local schools. However, Twain
declined to accompany Rogers and the rest of his party the next day as they set out
for a 450 mile (725 km) tour across southern Virginia and West Virginia along the
route of the newly-completed bituminous coal conveying railroad. Twain chose
instead to return to New York via steamboat.
On the morning of May 20, 1909, Rogers awoke at his New York City townhouse and
told his wife he was feeling extremely poorly. His physician was called
immediately, but before he could arrive, within the hour, the 69-year old was dead
of a stroke. That same morning, Twain was already aboard a New Haven Railroad
passenger train en route from Connecticut to visit his friend and the family.
Arriving at Grand Central Station, he was met by his daughter with the terrible
news. Stricken with grief, he uncustomarily avoided news reporters who had
gathered, saying only "This is terrible...I cannot talk about it." Two days later,
he served as an honorary pallbearer at the Rogers funeral in New York City.
However, he declined to join the funeral party on the train ride for the interment
at Fairhaven. He said "I cannot bear to travel with my friend and not
converse."
Mark Twain is buried in his wife's family plot in Elmira, New York.
Career
overview
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse but evolved into a grim,
almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of
mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy
narrative and social criticism.
Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and
popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and
language.
Twain was also fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close
and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in
Tesla's laboratory. Twain's book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
features a time traveler from the America of Twain's day, using his knowledge of
science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. Twain also patented an
improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments.
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.
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are
profitable to the human race or doesn't. ... The pain which it inflicts upon
unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me
sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
From 1901 until his death in 1910, Twain was vice president of the American
Anti-Imperialist League. The league opposed the annexation of the Philippines by
the United States. Twain wrote Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published
in 1924, in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were
killed. Many but not all of Mark Twain's neglected and previously uncollected
writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.
Many of Mark Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. When
an anonymous slim volume was published in 1880 entitled 1601: Conversation, as it
was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors., Twain was among those
rumored to be the author. The issue was not settled until 1906, when Twain
acknowledged his literary paternity of this scatological masterpiece.
During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote an anti-war article entitled The
War Prayer. Through this internal struggle, Twain expresses his opinions of the
absurdity of slavery and the importance of following one's personal conscience
before the laws of society. It was submitted to Harper's Bazaar for publication,
but on March 22, 1905, the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a
woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Daniel Carter Beard,
to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my
time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an
exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish The War
Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923.
In later years, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially
irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was
not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published
in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote
the most familiar version of this story. Twain was critical of organized religion
and certain elements of the Christian religion through most of the end of his
life.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Mark
Twain - Manifesting Generator - Biography
