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Mark Twain (1835-1910) - pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens |
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American
writer, journalist, and
humorist,
who
won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures of Tom
Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain had a natural talent for humour, but
beneath the surface of comedy there's often an undercurrent of sadness.
Dreadful things happen in his stories. Sensitive to the sound of
language, Twain
introduced colloquial speech into American fiction. Some of his
writings on religion and the hypocrisy of American society were not
published in his life time. When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. (from Old Times on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, Toronto: Belford Brothers, MDCCCLXXVI, p. 9) Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was born in Florida,
Missouri, of a Virginian family. The family soon moved to Hannibal,
Missouri, where Twain was brought up. At school, accroding to his own
words, he "excelled only in spelling". After his father's death in
1847, Twain was apprenticed to a printer. Her also started his career
as a journalist by writing for the Hannibal Journal. Later
Twain worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-61). His
famous penname Twain adopted from the call ('Mark twain!' – meaning by
the mark of two fathoms) used when sounding river shallows. But this
isn't the full story: he had also satirized an older writer, Isaiah
Sellers, who called himself Mark Twain. In 1861 Twain served briefly as
a confederate irregular. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat
traffic, and during a period when Twain was out of work, he lived in a
primitive cabin on Jackass Hill and tried his luck as a gold-miner. "I
would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the
rest," he said. "Cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of
lead, were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that
gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as
frenzied as the craziest." (Roughung It by Mark Twain, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913, p. 184) Twain moved to Virginia City, where he edited two years Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, "Mark Twain" was born when he signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. In 1864 Twain left for California, where worked in San Francisco as a reporter. After hearing a story about a frog, Twain made an entry in his notebook: "Coleman with his jumping frog – bet a stranger $50. – Stranger had no frog and C. got him one: – In the meantime stranger filled C's frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won." From these lines he developed 'Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog' which was published in The Saturday Press of New York on the 18th of November in 1865. It was reprinted all over the country and became the foundation stone of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867). This work marked the beginning of Twain's literary career. In 1866 Twain visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip. He then set out world tour, travelling in France and Italy. His experiences Twain recorded in The Innocents Abroad (1869). The book, which gained him wide popularity, poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. When William Dean Howells praised the author in The Atlantic Monthly, Twain thanked him by saying: "When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white." (Mark Twain: A Biography: Volume I by Albert Bigelow Paine, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912, p. 390) The success of the book gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870, after writing about 189 love letters during his courtship. Twain had seen her picture on the Quaker City cruise in the summer of 1867 and had fallen immediately in love with her. To to improve his reputation in the eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, Twain gave up drinking, smoking, swearing, and even attented church for a time. More than most of his colleagues, Twain traveled also places such as Fiji Islands, Australia, and South Africa. Throughout his life, Twain frequently returned to travel writing – many of his finest novels, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), dealt with journeys and escapes into freedom. Olivia, Twain's beloved Livy, served and protected her husband
devotedly. They moved to Hartford, where the family remained, with
occasional trips abroad, until 1891. Twain continued to lecture in the
United States and England. In April 1879, he gave a talk to the Stomach Club on the subject of 'the Science of Onanism.' Between 1876 and 1884 he published several
masterpieces. Tom Sawyer was originally intended for adults.
Twain had abandoned the work in 1874, but returned to it in the
following summer and even then was undecided if he were writing a book
for adults or for young readers. Eventually he declared that it was
"professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's book". The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
was about Edward VI of England and a little pauper
who change places. This satirical novel was dedicated "to those good-mannered and
agreeable children, Susie and Clara Clemens." Life on the Mississippi(1883)
contained an attack on the influence of Sir Walter Scott: "Then comes
Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks
this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love
with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion;
with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses
and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a
brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm;
more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that
ever wrote." (Life on the Mississippi, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883, p. 467) From the very beginning of his journalistic career,
Twain made fun with the novel and its tradition. Although Twain enjoyed
magnificent popularity as a novelist, he believed that he lacked the
analytical sensibility necessary to the novelist's art. As a public
speaker, he was exceptional. "Every word, almost," a reviewer said,
"was a joke." The English actor Sir Henry Irving told Twain once that
he had missed his true calling he chose writing over acting. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote: "All
modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry
Finn." (Green Hills
of Africa by Ernest Hemingway, decorations by Edward Shenton, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953, p. 22) Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1884), an American Odysseus and a powerful
indictment of slavery, was first considered adult fiction. Huck, who
could not possibly write a story, tells us the story:
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of "The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter. That book was
made by Mr. Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." (Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, New York: Charles L Webster and Company, 1885, p. 17) Both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn stand high on the list of eminent writers like Stevenson, Dickens, and Saroyan who honestly depicted young people. Huck's debate whether or not he will turn in Jim, an escaped slave and a friend, probed the racial tensions of the national conscience. Later Twain wrote in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900): "I am quite sure that (bar none) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no colour prejudices nor caste prejudices not creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can't be any worse." (The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches, second edition, London: Chatto & Windus, 1900, p. 204) A new and politically correct edition of the novel, that replaced the notorious N-word with "slave", appeared in 2011 with a wave of negative comments. The 200-year old racial slur appears in the book over 200 times. One of Twain's major achievements is the way he narrates Huckleberry Finn, following the twists and turns of ordinary speech, his native Missouri dialect. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has noted in Was Huck Black? (1993) that the book drew upon a vernacular formed by black voices as well as white. The model for Huck Finn's voice, according to Fishkin, was a black child instead of a white one. The character of Huck was based on a boy named Tom Blankenship, Twain's boyhood friend. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead
Wilson (1884) was a murder mystery and a case of transposed
identities, but also an implicit condemnation of a society that allows
slavery. Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc (1895) was published
under the pseudonym of Sieur Louis de Conte. In the 1890s Twain lost
most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the downhill of
his own publishing firm, C.L. Webster, which he had established in 1884
in New York City. In 1894 he had invested in the infamous Paige
typesetter, which never worked. "Paige & I always meet on effusively
affectionate terms," Twain said, "& yet he knows perfectly well
that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor
& watch that trap till he died." (The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography by Fred Kaplan, New York: Anchor Books, 2005, p. 439) Twain closed Hartford house. To
recover from the bankrupt, he started a world lecture tour. By 1898 he
had repaid all debts. From 1896 to 1900 Twain resided mainly in Europe.
Susy, his favorite daughter, died of spinal meningitis during the tour. Twain traveled New Zealand, Australia, India, and South
Africa, and returned to the U.S. in 1900. In 1902 Twain made a
trip to
Hannibal, his home town which had inspired several of his works. His
plans for a peaceful and quiet visit were ruined when more than 100
newspapers chronicled his every move. Between 1870 and 1905 Twain tried repeatedly to write or dictate his autobiography. His dictations to a stenographer formed the bulk of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, but he insisted that it should not be published in its entirety until a hundred years after his death. "A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way," Twain said. However, parts of the text appeared in 1924, then in 1940 and 1959. The death of his wife in 1904 in Florence and his second
daughter darkened the author's final years, which is also seen in
writings and
his posthumously published autobiography (1924). In fact he embraced atheism. Twain's view of the
human nature had never been very optimistic, but eventually he began to sound like Ambrose Bierce
(1842-1914) in The Devil's Dictionary (1911). Twain wrote in A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell:
"Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but
the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from
the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain." "Bierce
allegedly characterized Twain as "a clown, clever
enough to assume at time[s] the dignity of a blunder in letters." (An Ambrose Bierce Companion by Robert L. Gale, 2001, p. 288) Moreover, Twain had grave doubts about the nature of reality. When he revisited his old Hartford house, he imagined the event as a "homecoming fantasy," one in which he found himself "still at home with his family." (Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism, and a Sense of Place by Harold P. Simonson, 1989, pp. 128-129) In The Mysterious Stranger (1916), Twain's uncompleted novella published posthumously, Satan explains, just like George Berkeley (1685-1753), that physical objects are nothing but ideas in the mind: "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaved. no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" (The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922, p. 140) Set in the 16th-century Austria, Satan reveals that the "first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation!" (Ibid., p. 112) Twain composed the work between 1897 and 1908 in several, quite different versions, one of which was set in Hannibal, another in a print shop. Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's authorized biographer, apparently added to it a concluding chapter from another version altogether. Much of his life, Twain was against conventional religion, but especially hostile he was towards Christianity: "If men neglected "God's poor" and 'God's stricken and helpless ones" as He does, what would become of them? The answer is to be found in those dark lands where man follows His example and turns his indifference back upon them: they get no help at all; they cry, and plead and pray in vain, they linger and suffer, and miserably die." (from 'Thoughts of God,' in Mark Twain's Fables of Man, edited with an introduction by John S. Tuckey, Berkley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 114) Twain died on April 21, 1910. His autobiography Twain dictated to his secretary A.B. Paine; various versions of it have been published. Twain's colorful life inspired the film The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), directed by Irving Rapper and starring Fredric March. In Philip José Farmer's Riverworld epic Mark Twain was one of the central characters. Besides fiction, Twain produced a considerable
number of essays, which appeared in various newspapers and in
magazines, including the Galaxy, Harper's, the Atlantic
Monthly, and North American Review. In his letters from the Sandwich Islands Twain described how the missionaries and
American government have corrupted the Hawaiians, 'Queen Victoria's
Jubilee' (1897) presented the pomp and pageantry of an English royal
procession, and King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905)
revealed in a
dramatic monologue the political evils caused by despotism. The King
complains: "Blister the meddlesome missionaries! They write tons of
these things. They seem to be always around, always spying, always
eye-witnessing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to
paper. They are always prowling from place to place; the natives
consider them their only friends; they go to them with their sorrows;
they show them their scars and their wounds, inflicted by my soldier
police; they hold up the stumps of their arms and lament because their
hands have been chopped off, as punishment for not bringing in enough
rubber, and as proof to be laid before my officers that the required
punishment was well and truly carried out. . . . They travel and
travel, they spy and spy! And nothing is too trivial for them to print." (King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defenxe of His Congo Rule, Boston, Mass.: The P. R. Warren Co., 1905, pp. 12-13)
Twain's finest satire of imperialism was perhaps 'To the
Person Sitting in Darkness,' in which the author wrote:
"Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in
Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and
there is money in it yet, if carefully worked—but not enough, in my
judgment, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit
in Darkness are getting to be too scarce—too scarce and too shy. And
such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality,
and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in
Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or
profitable for us. We have been injudicious." (North American Review, No. DXXXL, February, 1901, p. 165) Biographies and other information: Mark Twain: A Biography by Albert Bigelow Paine (1912); Mark Twain by Edgar Lee Masters (1938); Mark Twain: Social Critic by Philip Foner (1958); Mark Twain: Social Philosopher by Louis J. Budd (1962); Mark Twain Himself by Milton Meltzer (1960); Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Henry Nash Smith (1963); Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain by Justin Kaplan (1966); Mark Twain by Charles Neider (1967); Mark Twain as Critic by Sydney J. Krause (1967); Plots and Characters in the Works of Mark Twain by Robert L. Gale (1973); The Art of Mark Twain by William H. Gibson (1976); Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer by William R. Macnaughton (1979); Mark Twain by Robert Keith Miller (1983); The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century by Bud Foote (1990); Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale by Henry B. Wonham (1993); The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography Fred Kaplan (2003); Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years by Karen Lystra (2004); Mark Twain's America: A Celebration in Words and Images by Harry L. Katz & The Library of Congress (2014); Mark Twain: A Christian Response to His Battle With God by Ray Comfort (2014); Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece by Andrew Levy (2014); Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871-1891 by Gary Scharnhorst (2019); Helen Keller and Mark Twain by Philip Wolny (2020); Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of his Library and Reading, vol ii by Alan Gribben, Thomas A. Tenney (2022); Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891-1910 by Gary Scharnhorst (2022) Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla by Shannon H. Harts (2022); Mark Twain and the Critics, 1891-1910: Selected Notices of the Late Writings by Gary Scharnhorst and Leslie Diane Myrick (2023) Selected works:
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