Mark Twain (1835–1910) is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the great humorist of American literature. A former Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist and lecturer, he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Ernest Hemingway called the source of all modern American literature. His travel books and speeches made him the most famous American of his time.
Works
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A boyhood on the Mississippi
Samuel Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal, a small town on the west bank of the Mississippi. Missouri was then a slave state, and his family owned an enslaved person for a time. After his father's death in 1847 he left school to work as a printer's apprentice, then as a typesetter in several cities.
In 1857 he became an apprentice riverboat pilot, learning by heart every bend, sandbar and snag along more than a thousand miles of the river. He received his licence in 1859, and later called the pilot the only unfettered and entirely independent human being on earth. The Civil War closed the river in 1861 and ended this career.
Out West
Clemens went west to Nevada with his brother Orion, tried his luck as a silver prospector, and became a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. There, in 1863, he first signed a piece 'Mark Twain', a riverboat call meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet, of water, just deep enough for safe passage.
In 1865 a tall tale he had heard in a California mining camp, about a frog-jumping contest, was printed in New York and reprinted across the country. A newspaper sent him to Hawaii, then on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land, which became The Innocents Abroad (1869), a bestseller that mocked both the Old World and American tourists.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
In 1870 Twain married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy family from Elmira, New York, and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in an extravagant house. There he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), a comic novel about boyhood in a town modelled on Hannibal, and Life on the Mississippi, a memoir of his piloting days.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is narrated by Tom's friend Huck, a boy who runs away down the river on a raft with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Written entirely in the voices of ordinary Missourians, it was banned by some libraries as coarse on publication, and is still debated today for its language; it is also one of the most powerful books ever written about friendship across the colour line.
Fame, ruin and grief
Twain invested a fortune in a mechanical typesetting machine that never worked, and his publishing firm failed in 1894. To pay his debts in full, he went on a lecture tour around the world, from Australia to India and South Africa, and wrote about it in Following the Equator. His favourite daughter, Susy, died of meningitis in 1896 while he was abroad; his wife died in 1904 and his daughter Jean in 1909.
His late writings grew bitter, but in public he remained a celebrated wit with a white suit and a cigar, honoured with a degree by Oxford in 1907. He died at his home in Redding, Connecticut, on 21 April 1910.
Anecdotes
Halley's Comet
Twain was born in 1835, about two weeks after Halley's Comet reached its closest point to the Sun. In 1909 he said that he had come in with the comet and expected to go out with it, since the Almighty had said of him and the comet that they were 'unaccountable freaks' and must go out together. The comet returned in April 1910; Twain died the day after its closest approach to the Sun.
Greatly exaggerated
In 1897, while Twain was in London, rumours spread that he was gravely ill or even dead. A journalist from the New York Journal came to check, and Twain gave him a note saying that the report of his death was an exaggeration. The line is now usually quoted, in a sharper form, as the reports of his death being greatly exaggerated.
The first typewritten novel
Twain was fascinated by new inventions. He was one of the first writers to own a typewriter, bought in 1874, and in his autobiography he claimed to have been the first to submit a typewritten book manuscript to a publisher. Scholars generally think the book was Life on the Mississippi, typed from his handwritten pages.
Frequently asked questions
What is Mark Twain's real name?
Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He first used the pen name Mark Twain in 1863; it comes from the call of Mississippi boatmen sounding the depth of the river, meaning two fathoms.
What are Mark Twain's best-known books?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad.
Why is Huckleberry Finn controversial?
The novel uses the racial slurs common in the speech of its time and place, and some readers find its portrayal of Jim stereotyped. Others see it as a profound attack on slavery and racism. It has been removed from some school reading lists and defended by many writers and critics.
When did Mark Twain die?
On 21 April 1910, at his house, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut, aged seventy-four.