MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS) 1835-1910 & amuel Langhorne Clemens, the third of five children, was born on November » 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the somewhat larger Mississippi river town ‘af Hannibal, Missouri, that place of idylls and also dangers he called St, Petersburg in his writings, home to his two most famous char- acters, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. ‘Twain's father, a justice of the peace who had unsuccessfully tried to become a storekeeper, died when Twain was twelve, and from that time on Twain worked to support himself and the rest of the family. After his father's death, Twain was apprenticed to a printer, and in 1851, when his brother Orion became a publisher in Hannibal, Twain went to work for him, But he soon made an escape from his brother's print shop, as he was being paid virtually nothing for his work, often running the entire operation by himself, In 1853 he began three years of travel, stopping in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk (lowa), and Cincinnati, in each place working as an itinerant journeyman printer. In 1856 he left Cincinnati for New Orleans by steamboat, intending to go to the ‘Amazon. He changed his plans, however, and instead apprenticed himself to Hor- ace Bixby, a Mississippi riverboat pilot. After training for eighteen months, Twain became a pilot himself, and he practiced this lucrative and prestigious trade until 1861, when the Civil War virtually ended commercial river traffic. During this time he wrote humorous accounts of his activities for the Keokuk Saturday Post. But he soon left the Mississippi River Valley because the river was closed by Union block- ades and because he was in danger of being drafted into the Union Navy for his skills. Slavery was legal in Missouri, though the state did not join the Confederacy, and ‘Twain may have seen brief service in a woefully unorganized Gonfederate militia, an experience that he later fictionalized in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). In 1861 he went west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territorial government. This move started him on the path toward his life as a humorist, lecturer, journalist, and author In Roughing It (1872), written a decade later, Twain fictionally elaborated the brothers’ stagecoach adven- tures on the way to Carson City and recounted his unsuccessful schemes for mak- ing money (including mining the Comstock lode in Virginia City) once he got there. ea giMARK TWAIN | 119 Throughout Roughing It, which also covers his stint in San Francisco as a reporter and his half-hearted gold-mining in the Sierras, as well as his trip to Hawaii, ‘Twain debunked the idea of the West as a place where fortunes could be easily made and showed its disappointing and even brutal side, In this respect, ‘Twain joined the group of writers who were trying to tell eastern readers what the West was really like, while exalting in the freedom and outright craziness of western startup towns and encampments, operating far from eastern laws, orthodoxies, and even com- mon sense. ¥ In the West, Twain began writing for newspapers, first the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City and then, after 1864, the Californian in San Francisco, ‘The fashion of the time called for a pen name, and so from a columnist for the New Orleans Times- Picayune, he borrowed “Mark Twain,” which means in riverboat terms "two fathoms deep," or “safe water.” His early writing was modeled on the humorous journalism of the day, especially that practiced by his friend and roommate in Nevada, who wrote under the pen name Dan De Quille. Also important to his development during these years were friendships with the western writer Bret Harte, the famous professional lecturer and comic Artemus Ward, and the obscure amateur raconteur Jim Gillis. ‘Twain's reputation as a lecturer and his first success as a writer lay in his skillful retelling of a well-known tall tale, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” first published in 1865, In this same year Twain signed with the Sacramento Union to write a series of let ters covering the newly opened steamboat passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu, In these letters he used a fictitious character, Mr. Brown, to present inelegant ideas and unorthodox views, attitudes, and information, often in impolite language. This device allowed him to say just about anything he wanted, provided he could convincingly claim he was simply reporting what others said and did, The refinement of this deadpan technique made it a staple of his lectures. Twain's first book of this period, and still one of his most popular, was Innocents Abroad (1869), consisting of a revised form of the letters he wrote for the Alta California and New York Tribune during his 1867 excursion on the Quaker City to the Mediterranean and Holy Land. With his fare paid for by the Alta California, Twain, through letters to that San Francisco newspaper, provided a running account of the first great mod- ern American tourist raid on the Old World. Twain wrote hilarious satires of his fellow passengers as well as the pretentious, decadent, and undemocratic Old World as viewed by a citizen of a young country on the rise. A characteristically imperti- nent note was sounded in a remark upon disembarking in New York: When Twain was asked for his impressions of the Holy Land, he said he knew for a fact there would be no Second Coming, for if Jesus had been there once he certainly wouldn't go back. Such scoffing drew angry editorials and speeches, publicity that helped make Innocents Abroad successful. Twain's publishers sold Innocents Abroad and other of his books mainly by sub- scription, with door-to-door salespeople offering sometimes gaudy, alway: lavishly illustrated volumes of his books as diversion and entertainment, (For an example of one of the many illustrations from Roughing It, see p. 127). Though the trade was regarded as low, and though many books sold by subscription were not reviewed by the established literary and general interest magazines of the time, subscription houses accounted for nearly two-thirds of American bookselling in the 1870s. ‘Twain's shrewd understanding of the dynamics of the publishing industry, including the importance of lining up first-rate illustrators, helped to establish him as a popular author during this time. ‘Twain's many travels, including later lecture tours around the globe, did not erase the rich material of his Missouri boyhood, which ran deep in his memory and imagination. To get to it, he had, in effect, to work chronologically backward and psychically inward, He tentatively probed this material as early as 1870 in an early version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer called A Boy's Manuscript. In 1875 he wrote120 | MARK TWAIN Old Times on the Mississippi in seven installments for the Atlantic Monthly (edited by his friend William Dean Howells, who tirelessly promoted Twain's career), arriv- ing at the place that many critics see as his imaginative home. These sketches were later incorporated into Life on the Mississippi (1883), written after Twain took a monthlong steamboat trip on the Mississippi, stopping along the way to visit Hanni- bal. The added material—part history, part memoir, part travelogue —offers, among other things, a critique of the southern romanticism Twain believed had made the Civil War inevitable, a theme that would reappear in his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain had married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy coal dealer from Buf- falo, New York, in 1870. This entry into a higher stratum of society than he had previously known, along with his increasing fascination with wealth, created a constant struggle in his work between the conventional and the disruptive, which is typical of much of the best American humor. In the perennially popular The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the struggle emerges in the contrast between the entrepreneurial but entirely respectable Tom and his disreputable friend Huck. In this narrative, Twain also mingles childhood pleasures with childhood fears of the violence, terror, and death lurking at che edges of the village. This book has long been recognized as an adult classic as well as a children’s book, and its publi- cation further consolidated Twain's status as @ writer of popular fiction. Twain began Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876 as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, but he put the manuscript aside for several years and finished it in 1884, when his thinking about Huck and his story had changed and matured considerably. In recent years the racial (and racist) implications of Huck Finn have been the subjects of critical debate, as have questions about the racial beliefs of the author. (For more on the critical controversy, see the selections in “Race and the Ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” immediately following the novel.) Similar questions have been raised about gender and sexuality in Twain's life and work. In Twain's own day Huck Finn was banned in many libraries and schools around the country and denounced in pulpits not for its racial content but for its supposedly encouraging boys to swear, smoke, and run away, Nevertheless, Huck Finn has enjoyed extraordinary popularity since its publication. It broke literary ground as a novel written in the vernacular and established the vernacular’s capacity to result in high art. Its unpretentious, collo- quial, yet poetic style, its wide-ranging humor, its embodiment of the enduring and widely shared dream of innocence and freedom, and its recording of a vanished way of life in the pre—Civil War Mississippi Valley have instructed and moved people of all ages and conditions all over the world. Huck Finn sold 51,000 copies in its first fourteen months, compared to Tom Sawyer's 25,000 in the same period. Ernest Hemingway once called it the source of “all modern American literature.” ‘Twain wrote another successful and memorable book in this period, the bitter A Connecticut Yankee in King ‘Arthur's Court (1889). The novel seems to be a satire on sixth-century Arthurian England seen through the eyes of a crafty “Yankee,” Hank Morgan, who is transported back thirteen centuries and tries to “introduce,” in “Twain's words, the “great and beneficent civilization of the nineteenth century” into the chivalric and decidedly undemocratic world of Camelot. But Hank's “Gilded Age” schemes end in their own destruction ‘and the massacre of thousands of knights. The Tragedy of Pudd'thead Wilson (1894) similarly offers a dark and troubling view of nineteenth-century American values. Set in a Mississippi River town of the 1830s, the novel follows the tragic consequences of switching two babies at birth—one free, one slave, and both children of the same white, slave-owning father. The novel provides an intense, sometimes chaotic meditation on the absurdities of defining individuals in relation to race; on the impact on personality. and fate of labels like “white” and “black”; and on biological, legal, and social descriptions of human identity. In the decade after Puddn'head Wilson was published, Twain experienced a series of calamities. Suddenly, his health became bad; poor investments led to bankruptcyPa kia i iid THE NOTORIOUS JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY | 121 in the panic of 1893; his youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed as epilepti est daughter, Susy, died of meningitis while he was away; and his wife, Livy, began to decline into permanent invalidism. For several years writing was both agonized labor and necessary therapy. The results of these circumstances were a travel book, Following the Equator (1897), which records the round-the-world lecture tour that ‘Twain undertook to pay off debts; a sardonically brilliant interrogation of middle- class American morality, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900); an embit- tered treatise on humanity's foibles, follies, and venality, What Is Man? (1906); and the bleakly despairing The Mysterious Stranger, first published in an inaccurate and unauthorized yersion by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's first biographer, in 1916. Scholars continue to study the large bulk of Twain's unfinished or (until recently) unpublished writings and have called for reevaluation of his work from the decade after 1895. His late writings, most of which Twain declined to see published while he lived, reveal a darkening worldview and an upwelling of anger against orthodoxies of every sort, including organized religious belief and international capitalism and colonialism. In his later years, Twain, by now world famous, found himself consulted by the press on every subject of general interest. Though his views on political, military, and social subjects were often acerbic, it was only to his best friends that he confessed the depth of his disillusionment, Much of this bitterness informs such published works as “To a Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), “The United States of Lyncher- dom” (1901), and “King Leopold's Soliloquy” (1905), as well as other writings unpub- lished in his lifetime, such as Letters from the Earth, in which he skewers religion from the skeptical and irreverent perspective of Satan. Twain maintained his power with language throughout his career. What he said of one of his characters explains a large part of his permanent appeal: “He could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint [joint] started, anywheres” (Life on the Mississippi [1883], Chapter 3). Twain knew the nation’s various regions and its history; he repre- sented, expressed, and attacked the American character all at once. Humor was his way of bringing together these three approaches. As his friend Howells observed, Twain was unlike any of his contemporaries in American letters: “Emerson, Longfel- low, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, pocts, seers, crit- ics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” ai, | . = = mai ce ee