Biography
 Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835–April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.
Although he was confounded by financial and business affairs, his humor and wit was keen, and he enjoyed immense public popularity. At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. In 1907, crowds at the Jamestown Exposition thronged just to get a glimpse of him. He had dozens of famous friends, including such diverse people as Booker T. Washington, Helen Keller, and Henry Huttleston Rogers. Regarding his work, another American author William Faulkner, is credited with writing that Twain was “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs”.
Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri to John and Jane Clemens, and was the third of four surviving children. His family was always moving, and when he was four years old his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, praying that they would have good fortune there. This was the town that Clemens used imaginatively in one of his most famous works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
In 1847 Samuel’s father died and left the family with many debts. The eldest son, Orion, began publishing a newspaper, and Samuel began as a journeyman printer and occasional writer. Samuel also traveled to St. Louis and New York City to work as a printer.
The adventure of the Mississippi eventually drew Clemens to a career as a steamboat pilot. He later stated in one of his books Life on the Mississippi(1883) that it would have held him to the end of his days. He said that the people he met on the river were a great help to improving his enjoyment of reading. He met numerous different characters on the river. One man named Horace Bixby (later the head pilot of the Union navy fleet), took him on as a cub pilot. And Mr. Brown, a tyrannical pilot, made him feel like an “emancipated slave” when he no longer had to put up with him. Samuel’s younger brother Henry was killed in a boiler explosion. The Civil War and the advent of railroads put an end to commercial steamboat traffic in 1861, and he had to look for a new job.
“Roughing it” out West
After a brief stint with a Confederate militia (an experience he talked about in his short story, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” in 1885), he escaped the Civil War by going west in July, 1861 with his brother, Orion, who was appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. They traveled for over two weeks on a stagecoach across the great plains and the Rocky Mountains to the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. On the way they visited the polygamous Mormon community in Salt Lake City.
Clemens’ experiences out West formed him as a writer and became the basis of his second book, Roughing It. Once in Nevada he became a miner, hoping to strike it rich digging up silver in the Comstock Lode and staying for long periods in camp with his fellow prospectors—another mode of living that he later put to literary use. Failing as a miner, he fell into newspaper work in Virginia City for the Territorial Enterprise, where he adopted the pen name “Mark Twain” for the first time.
Pen names
Clemens maintained that his primary pen name “Mark Twain” came from his years on the riverboat, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or “safe water” was measured on the sounding line, was marked by calling “mark twain”. But it is often thought that the name actually came from his wilder days in the West, where he would buy two drinks and tell the bartender to “mark twain” on his tab. The true origin is unknown. In addition to Mark Twain, Clemens used the pseudonym “Sieur Louis de Conte”.
Twain himself late wrote:
The old gentleman [Captain Isaiah Sellers] was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them “MARK TWAIN,” and give them to the “New Orleans Picayune.” They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. [...] I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a “cub” at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the “New Orleans True Delta.” It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man’s heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. [...] He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed Mark Twain to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.[1]
Regardless of the source of the name, “Mark Twain” was “born” as his pen name in the office of the Nevada Territorial Enterprise, when Clemens first used that name on an article published on February 3, 1863.
Literary success, lecturing
In 1864, he moved down to San Francisco and wrote for several papers there. In 1865, Twain had his first literary success. At the behest of humorist Artemus Ward (whom he had met and befriended in Virginia City during Ward’s lecture tour of 1863), he submitted a humorous short story for a collection Ward was publishing. The story arrived too late for that book, but the publisher passed it to the Saturday Press. That story, originally entitled “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” but now better known as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” was reprinted nationwide, and called by Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell “the finest piece of humorous literature yet produced in America.”
In the spring of 1866 he was commissioned by the Sacramento Union newspaper to travel to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to write a series of letters reporting on his journey there. On his return to San Francisco, the success of the letters and the personal encouragement of Colonel John McComb (publisher of San Francisco’s Alta California newspaper) led him to try his hand at the lecture circuit, renting the Academy of Music and charging a dollar a head admission. “Doors open at 7 o’clock,” Twain wrote on the advertising poster. “The trouble to begin at 8 o’clock.”
The first lecture was a wild success, and soon Twain was traveling up and down the state, lecturing and entertaining to packed houses.
First book and family
But it was another trip that established his fame as an author. In 1867, Twain convinced Col. McComb of the Alta California to pay for Twain’s passage aboard the steam packet Quaker City on an American excursion to Europe and the Middle East.
The resulting letters Twain produced for the newspaper reporting on the trip would form the basis of his first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), a large and humorous travelogue that pointedly failed to worship Old World arts and conventions. Sold by subscription, the book became hugely popular and put its author in a spotlight he never willingly relinquished for the rest of his life.
In 1868, he published two short stories in Francis Pharcellus Church’s popular The Galaxy magazine. In 1869, he moved to Buffalo, New York to take a position as Managing Editor for the Buffalo Express newspaper.
After the success of Innocents Abroad, he married Olivia Langdon in the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York on February 2, 1870. Twain began to write a monthly column called Memoranda for The Galaxy, and a son, Langdon, was born to the couple on November 7. In 1871, the family moved to Nook Farm neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut. A daughter (Olivia Susan “Susy”) was born March 19, 1872. In June, young Langdon succumbed to diphtheria and died. Two more daughters were born: Clara Langdon (1874) and Jane Lampton “Jean” (1880). During this period, Twain lectured often in the United States and England.
Career overview
Twain’s greatest contribution to American literature is generally considered to be the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Ernest Hemingway himself said:
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. ...all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Also popular are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the non-fictional Life on the Mississippi.
Twain began as a writer of light humorous verse; he ended as a grim, almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and acts of killing committed by mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism in a way almost unrivaled in world literature.
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 had a fascination with science and scientific inquiry. Twain developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla. They spent quite a bit of time together (in Tesla’s laboratory, among other places). A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court featured a time traveler from the America of Twain’s day who used 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 vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, from 1901 until his death in 1910.^ 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. The League opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. He wrote Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed.
In recent years, there have been occasional attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn from various libraries, because Twain’s use of local color offends some people. Although Twain was against racism and imperialism far in front of public sentiment of his time, some with only superficial familiarity of his work have condemned it as racist for its accurate depiction of the language in common use in the United States in the 19th century. Expressions that were used casually and unselfconsciously then are often perceived today as racism (in present times, such racial epithets are far more visible and condemned). Twain himself would probably be amused by these attempts; in 1885, when a library in Massachusetts banned the book, he wrote to his publisher, “They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash suitable only for the slums’, that will sell 25,000 copies for us for sure.”
Many of Mark Twain’s works have been suppressed at times for one reason or another. 1880 saw the publication of an anonymous slim volume 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, but the issue was not settled until 1906, when Twain acknowledged his literary paternity of this scatological masterpiece.
Twain at least saw 1601 published during his lifetime. Twain wrote an anti-war article entitled The War Prayer during the Philippine-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper’s Bazaar rejected it as “not quite suited to a woman’s magazine.” Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan 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 and it remained unpublished until 1923.
In his later life 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.
Perhaps most controversial of all was Mark Twain’s 1879 humorous talk at the Stomach Club in Paris entitled Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism (masturbation), which concluded with the thought “If you must gamble your lives sexually, don’t play a lone hand too much.” This talk was not published until 1943, and then only in a limited edition of fifty copies.
Later life and friendship with Henry H. Rogers
Twain’s fortunes then began to decline; in his later life, Twain was a very depressed man, but still capable. Following the erroneous publication of a premature obituary in the New York Journal, Twain famously responded: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” (June 2, 1897).
His only son, who was sick from the time of his birth, died after Clemens took him out for a walk on a blustery day without covering his carriage. His most favored daughter died while Clemens was in Australia completing a lecture series. After giving birth to four children, his wife was sickly for most of her adult life. All in all he lost 3 out of 4 of his children, and his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon, before his death in 1910. He also went through some very bad times with his businesses. His publishing company ended up going bankrupt, and he lost thousands of dollars on one typesetting machine that was never finished. He also lost a great deal of revenue on royalties from his books being plagiarized before he even had a chance to publish them himself.
In 1893, Twain was introduced to industrialist and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, one of the principals of Standard Oil. Rogers reorganized Twain’s tangled finances, and the two became close friends for the rest of their lives. Rogers’ family became Twain’s surrogate family and Twain was a frequent guest at the Rogers townhouse in New York City and summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. The two were drinking and poker buddies. In 1907, they traveled together in Rogers’ yacht Kanawha to the Jamestown Exposition held at Sewell’s Point near Norfolk, Virginia in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Colony.
While Twain openly credited Rogers with saving him from financial ruin, there is also substantial evidence in their published correspondence that the close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial, apparently softening at least somewhat the hard-driving industrialist Rogers, who had apparently earned the nickname “Hell Hound Rogers” when helping build Standard Oil earlier in his career. In one of history’s ironies, Rogers was introduced by Twain to investigative journalist Ida Tarbell, who is widely credited with exposing the dark side of Standard Oil, and did so largely through information she obtained through meetings with Rogers. During the years of their friendship, influenced by Twain, Rogers helped finance the education of Helen Keller and made substantial contributions to Dr. Booker T. Washington. After Rogers’ death, Dr. Washington revealed that Rogers (with a much-hated public persona) had been generously funding many small country schools and institutions of higher education in the South for the betterment and education of African Americans for over 15 years.
Although by this late date he was in marginal health, in April, 1909, Twain returned to Norfolk with Rogers, and was a guest speaker at the dedication dinner held for the newly completed Virginian Railway, a “Mountains to Sea” engineering marvel of the day. The construction of the new railroad had been solely financed by industrialist Rogers.
Rogers died suddenly in New York less than two months later. Twain, on his way by train from Connecticut to visit Rogers, was met with the news at Grand Central Station the same morning by his daughter. His grief-stricken reaction was widely reported. He served as one of the pall-bearers at the Rogers funeral in New York later that week. When he declined to ride the funeral train from New York on to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for the burial, he stated that he could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation.
Twain himself died less than one year later. He wrote in 1909, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did. Halley’s comet can be seen in the Earth’s skies once every 75-76 years. It was visible on November 30, 1835, when Mark Twain was born and was also visible on April 21, 1910, when he died (although the exact dates of Halley’s highpoint were November 16th and April 10th, respectively).
After his death, one of the prominent figures who paid public tribute to him was the President of the United States at the time, William H. Taft. In his words, “Mark Twain gave real intellectual enjoyment to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasures to millions yet to come. He never wrote a line that a father could not read to a daughter.” (Taft was presumably unaware of 1601).
Museums and attractions
Twain’s Hartford, Connecticut home is a museum and National Historic Landmark, known as The Mark Twain House. Twain also lived in the latter part of the 19th century in Elmira, New York where he had met his wife, and had many close ties. He and many members of his family lie buried in a wooded knoll in Woodlawn National Cemetery there. A small octagonal study, given to him as a gift when he lived at Quarry Farm east of Elmira and in which he wrote parts or all of several works, is now located on the grounds of Elmira College.
The big town of Hannibal, Missouri is another town that features many Mark Twain attractions including a boyhood house of his and the caverns he used to explore that are featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Two American steam-powered paddle boats traveling the Rivers of America attractions at Disneyland and Disneyland Paris are named after Mark Twain. An Audio-Animatronic Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin host The American Adventure show at Epcot.
Quotes
- “I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”
- “You can have heaven, I’d rather go to Bermuda.”
- “Familiarity breeds contempt – and babies.”
- “Golf is a good walk spoilt.”
- “Truth is our most valuable commodity, so let us economize.”
- “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add sheep was a tautology.” (notebook, 1902)
- “We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregration which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” (Corn-Pone Opinions)
- “Never put off until tomorrow that which could be done the day after tomorrow.”
- “A habit cannot be thrown out the window, it must be coaxed down the stairs one step at a time.”
- “Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
- “The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.”
- “There are several good protections against temptations but the surest is cowardice.”
- “Suppose you were a congressman, and suppose you were an idiot. But, I repeat myself.”
- The saying “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” is sometimes attributed to Twain. However, he did not coin it, but he did popularise it in the United States.
- “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
- “That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic—for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his…When I look around me, I am often troubled to see how many people are mad.” ^
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