Samuel Langhorne Clemens ( 1835 - 1910 )

His Life:

Childhood on the Mississippi River:

However, Twain's childhood was not all play. His father, a lawyer, died in 1847, and Twain, who was twelve years old, had to drop out of school and become an apprentice typesetter for local newspapers.

Twain later worked for his brother, Orion Clemens, who owned several newspapers. During this period Twain contributed a humorous piece to the "Carpet-Bag," a Boston magazine, under the pseudonym S. L. C.

He becomes a riverboat pilot:

With the coming of the war, however, Twain joined the Confederate forces. As he noted in his autobiography, "I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time."

He was soon out of the army and accompanying his brother Orion to Nevada Territory where the latter has been appointed secretary to the governor. In Nevada, Clemens panned for gold for a year, an experience he would later incorporate in the book Roughing It, just as he would utilize material from Hannibal and his riverboat piloting days in other popular books. If Clemens proved unsuccessful at ore mining, he was a wizard at mining his own life for material for his books.

The Jumping Frog story:

Upon returning to San Francisco, Clemens discovered that Artemus Ward, the well-known humorist, wanted a piece from him for a humor anthology. Twain wrote down his tale of a jumping frog filled with lead shot and first titled it "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," and later retitled it "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Too late for inclusion in the Ward anthology, Clemens's story was published in the New York Saturday Press, (1867) then pirated, then published along with other tales in Twain's book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. It was a tale, according to Pascal Covici, Jr., in Dictionary of Literary Biography, which spread Clemens's, or rather Twain's name "across the country, preparing the way for the national reputation he held for the rest of his life."

It is both a humorous regional tale and a comment on the Easterner's vision of the West. Clemens's tale is, "about telling the frog's story; that is, about 'celebrating' the frog, about how the frog becomes a celebrity," and displays the point-of-view technique that is at the heart of Clemens's humor.

Once in New York,Twain learned of the sailing of the Quaker City on a five-month cruise to Europe and the Holy Land and convinced his editors at the "Alta California" to foot the bill for his passage in exchange for travel letters.

An Innocent Abroad

Twain proceeded to shock his Pilgrims at every opportunity, lighting his cigar from the lava of Vesuvius, ready to scoff at the great works of art and the religious relics displayed to them. His letters home and the book he compiled from them formed the standard Yankee response to the Old World: a sardonic "show-me" attitude that once again pleased readers.

A second reward for the voyage was marriage. On board ship, Twain had become friends with a fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, son of a wealthy family and later married Charles's sister, Olivia. The couple received a mansion as a wedding present from Olivia's father, as well as a sizeable share in the Buffalo Examiner.

For several years, Clemens stayed on in Buffalo, contributing pieces to the newspaper, editing a magazine, and writing what would become his second book, Roughing It, about his adventures in Nevada. In 1871, after the death of his father-in-law, the Clemens family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, into the bosom of literary America-- Harriet Beecher Stowe was a neighbor--and built a magnificent home. New friends were made, significantly William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Clemens had arrived in the genteel world he had so long parodied. The family would remain in Hartford for the next twenty years, though the death of Clemens's son in the first years added sorrow to the joy of his successes.

Mr. Twain and the Two Toms:

The story, Clemens's first solo novel, is based loosely on the author's own boyhood in Hannibal. The tale follows the exploits of Tom over the course of one summer in the fictional town of St. Petersburg on the Mississippi. Told in the episodic style which Clemens had perfected in his earlier works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer joins several story lines together to stand the traditional preachy juvenile novel of the day on its head.

With Tom Sawyer it is not so much virtue that is rewarded as it is adventure and play. One thread of the story involves Tom's love for Becky Thatcher and his rebellious exploits at school. These typical childhood adventures are contrasted with the more elaborate ones Tom shares with his pal, Huck Finn. Together the two witness grave-robbing and the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe late one night; Tom and Huck run away from St. Petersburg for Jackson's Island. Homesickness brings them back to town, however, where the local people are holding a funeral for the boys, who are thought to have drowned. In the end, Tom seems to have joined the world of propriety. Tom tells his disappointed friend, "Huck, we can't let you into the gang if you ain't respectable, you know."

Clemens wrote in the preface to the novel that "Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in."

Today, it is regarded as a classic of childhood, especially to be read by adults of college age with an interest in the American past." Indeed,"few readers, of any age, can set Tom Sawyer aside once they start to read it." " Tom Sawyer quickly entered the American idiom--a mischievous youth with a good heart. "Tom is a conformist pretending to be a rebel, with one eye closely on the limits which his society would permit for token assaults on its institutions." The same might be said for Twain, himself.

The popular success of Tom Sawyer convinced Clemens to write a sequel, this time focusing on the character of Huck Finn, though this writing would occupy him for the next seven years. Meanwhile he had a family and house to support. More European travels inspired a new travel book, and then in 1881 The Prince and the Pauper was published.

The Prince and the Pauper was a stylistic departure for Clemens, written as it was with much archaic period language and a dearth of humor. Many critics at the time (and later) noted that Clemens seemed to be appealing to a genteel audience with his historical novel, and disappointing sales with his own subscription house confirmed that opinion.

A Return to the Mississippi:

Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the classics of American literature, and it is interesting to note that Twain himself, though pleased with his creation, in no way thought he had created a masterpiece. The reception of the book at the time was cool, even hostile. It was not until the early twentieth century that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn started to gain the stature of greatness it maintains today.

The Later Years

Clemens's financial problems grew ever worse until he and his publishing house finally went bankrupt. But realizing that the only barter a writer has is his character, he vowed to pay off all his debts. Leaving the United States with his family in 1894, Twain set off on a world-wide lecture tour and several years of living cheap in Europe. The last decade of Twain's life added more tragedy: the death of his wife in 1904 in Italy and of his daughter Jean in 1909, and the breakdown of a third daughter, Clara.

Twain spent much of the decade writing his autobiography, living first in a house on Fifth Avenue in New York, and then at the end in a villa near Redding, Connecticut. It is, ironically, these final years which are most vividly documented in scores of photographs and which made him into a literary icon. Twain became the dapper little man in a white linen suit--he only began wearing this trademark toward the end of his life, his hair and moustache thick and white.

When he died, on April 21, 1910, a nation mourned. Clemens took literature out of the academy and put it into the hands of Everyman. Some critics never forgave him that. Perhaps the most fitting epitaph would come from the mouth of his most beloved character, Huck, in the opening sentences of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "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 he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

His Books:

Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? It’s something every child should experience and every child will love. From Tom’s sly trickery with the whitewashed fence—when he cleverly manipulates everyone so they happily do his work for him—to his and Becky Thatcher’s calamities in Bat Cave, the enjoyment just never ends.

It is a book about Edward, the Prince of Wales, and Tom, a poor boy from the streets of London. Tom ventures out to the palace to meet a real prince, which was his lifelong desire. Edward rescues Tom from a crowd that jeered at him because of he was clothed in rags. The two become friends. They switch clothes and realize that they look exactly alike! But then everyone mistakes Edward for being the poor boy and Tom for being the prince.

Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. More than a century after its publication it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor.

A factory foreman in America named Hank Morgan, suffering a blow to the head, awakens to find himself in the time of King Arthur. Through his Yankee ingenuity, he "sets out to enlighten the kingdom," according to Hill in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Wreaking havoc with inventions from the nineteenth century, Hank is ultimately put into a trance by Merlin and sent back to his own time, where he finally awakens from his adventures to discover it has all been a dream. Variously seen as a diatribe against the technological world or as a critique of English culture, the book had a bleak tone, and the biting humor did not win a large readership. Critics of the day recognized the social satire inherent in the novel, and many, including Howells, commended the work.