Mark Twain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Twain |
Mark Twain, detail of photo by Mathew Brady, February 7, 1871
|
Born |
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
November 30, 1835
Florida, Missouri, U.S. |
Died |
April 21, 1910 (aged 74)
Redding, Connecticut, U.S. |
Pen name |
Mark Twain |
Occupation |
Writer, lecturer |
Nationality |
American |
Notable works |
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
Spouse |
Olivia Langdon Clemens (m. 1870–1904) |
Children |
Langdon, Susy, Clara, Jean |
|
Signature |
|
Samuel L. Clemens stamp, 1940
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),
[1] better known by his
pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and
humorist. He wrote
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its
sequel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
[2] the latter often called "the
Great American Novel."
Twain grew up in
Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for
Huckleberry Finn and
Tom Sawyer.
After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and
contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother
Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the
Mississippi River
before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to
his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
[3] In 1865, his humorous story, "
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published, based on a story he heard at
Angels Hotel in
Angels Camp, California,
where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought
international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek.
[4] His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to
presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and
lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money,
notably the
Paige Compositor,
which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of
these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via
bankruptcy, and with the help of
Henry Huttleston Rogers
eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his
pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility
to do so.
Twain was born shortly after a visit by
Halley's Comet,
and he predicted that he would "go out with it," too. He died the day
following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the "greatest
American humorist of his age,"
[5] and
William Faulkner called Twain "the father of
American literature."
[6]
Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in
Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was the son of Jane (née Lampton; 1803–1890), a native of Kentucky, and
John Marshall Clemens
(1798–1847), a Virginian by birth. His parents met when his father
moved to Missouri and were married several years later, in 1823.
[7][8] He was the sixth of seven children, but only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brother
Orion
(1825–1897); Henry, who died in a riverboat explosion (1838–1858); and
Pamela (1827–1904). His sister Margaret (1833–1839) died when he was
three, and his brother Benjamin (1832–1842) died three years later.
Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at six months.
[9] Twain was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of
Halley's Comet.
When he was four, Twain's family moved to
Hannibal, Missouri,
[10] a port town on the
Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
[11] Missouri was a
slave state and young Twain became familiar with the
institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing. Twain's father was an attorney and judge.
[12] The
Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad
was organized in his office in 1846. The railroad connected the second
and third largest cities in the state and was the westernmost United
States railroad until the completion of the
Transcontinental Railroad. It delivered mail to and from the
Pony Express.
[13]
Samuel Clemens, age 15
In 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of
pneumonia.
[14] The next year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a
typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the
Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City,
Philadelphia,
St. Louis, and
Cincinnati. He joined the newly formed
International Typographical Union, the printers
union, and
educated himself in
public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
[15] Clemens came from St. Louis on the packet
Keokuk in 1854
[16]
and lived in Muscatine during part of the summer of 1855. The Muscatine
newspaper published eight stories, which amounted to almost 6,000
words.
[17]
Twain describes in
Life on the Mississippi
how when he was a boy "there was but one permanent ambition" among his
comrades: to be a steamboatman. "Pilot was the grandest position of all.
The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary -
from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and
no board to pay." As Twain describes it, the pilot's prestige exceeded
that of the captain. The pilot had to "get up a warm personal
acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every
obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve
hundred miles; and more than that, must ... actually know where these
things are in the dark..."
Steamboat pilot
Horace E. Bixby
took on Twain as a "cub" pilot to teach him the river between New
Orleans and St. Louis for $500, payable out of Twain's first wages after
graduating. Twain studied the Mississippi, learning its landmarks, how
to navigate its currents effectively, and how to "read the river" and
its constantly shifting channels, reefs, submerged snags and rocks that
would "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated."
[18]
It was more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot
license in 1859. This occupation gave him his pen name, Mark Twain, from
"mark twain," the leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of two
fathoms, which was safe water for a steamboat. While training, Samuel
convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed
on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the
Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a dream a month earlier,
[19]:275 which inspired his interest in
parapsychology; he was an early member of the
Society for Psychical Research.
[20]
Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of
his life. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until
the
American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was
curtailed.
At the start of the Civil War, Twain enlisted briefly in a
Confederate local unit. He then left for Nevada to work for his brother,
Orion Clemens, who was secretary of the Nevada Territory, which Twain describes in his book
Roughing It.[21][22] Twain later wrote a sketch, "
The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," which told how he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding their company.
[23]
Travels
Library of
Twain House, with hand-stenciled paneling, fireplaces from India, embossed wallpapers, and hand-carved mantel purchased in Scotland
Twain joined Orion, who in 1861 became secretary to
James W. Nye, the governor of
Nevada Territory, and headed west. Twain and his brother traveled more than two weeks on a
stagecoach across the
Great Plains and the
Rocky Mountains, visiting the
Mormon community in
Salt Lake City.
Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of
Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a
miner on the
Comstock Lode.
[23] Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper, the
Territorial Enterprise.
[24] Working under writer and friend
Dan DeQuille, here he first used his pen name. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account
"Letter From Carson – re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain."
[25]
His experiences in the
American West inspired
Roughing It and his experiences in Angels Camp, California, in Calaveras County, provided material for "
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".
Twain moved to
San Francisco, California, in 1864, still as a journalist. He met writers such as
Bret Harte and
Artemus Ward. The young poet
Ina Coolbrith may have romanced him.
[26]
His first success as a writer came when his humorous
tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published in a New York weekly,
The Saturday Press, on November 18, 1865. It brought him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the
Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the
Sacramento Union. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.
[27]
In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the
Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were later compiled as
The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It was on this trip that he met his future brother-in-law, Charles Langdon. Both were passengers aboard the
Quaker City on their way to the Holy Land. Langdon showed a picture of his sister
Olivia to Twain; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight.
Upon returning to the United States, Twain was offered honorary membership in the secret society
Scroll and Key of
Yale University in 1868.
[28] Its devotion to "fellowship, moral and literary self-improvement, and charity" suited him well.
Marriage and children
Twain in 1867
Throughout 1868, Twain and
Olivia Langdon
corresponded, but she rejected his first marriage proposal. Two months
later, they were engaged. In February 1870, Twain and Langdon were
married in
Elmira, New York,
[27] where he had courted her and had overcome her father's initial reluctance.
[29] She came from a "wealthy but liberal family," and through her, he met
abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for
women's rights and
social equality," including
Harriet Beecher Stowe (his next-door neighbor in
Hartford, Connecticut),
Frederick Douglass, and the writer and
utopian socialist William Dean Howells,
[30] who became a long-time friend. The couple lived in
Buffalo, New York, from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the
Buffalo Express newspaper and worked as an editor and writer. While they were living in Buffalo, their son Langdon died of
diphtheria at age 19 months. They had three daughters:
Susy (1872–1896),
Clara (1874–1962)
[31] and
Jean
(1880–1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's
death in 1904. All of the Clemens family are buried in Elmira's
Woodlawn Cemetery.
Twain moved his family to
Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of
a home
(local admirers saved it from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned
it into a museum focused on him). In the 1870s and 1880s, Twain and his
family summered at
Quarry Farm, the home of Olivia's sister, Susan Crane.
[32][33] In 1874,
[32]
Susan had a study built apart from the main house so that her
brother-in-law would have a quiet place in which to write. Also, Twain
smoked pipes constantly, and Susan Crane did not wish him to do so in
her house. During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874–1891) and over
twenty summers at Quarry Farm, Twain wrote many of his classic novels,
among them
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
The Prince and the Pauper (1881),
Life on the Mississippi (1883),
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book
A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a stay in
Heidelberg from May 6 until July 23, 1878, and a visit to London.
Love of science and technology
Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with
Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory.
Twain patented three inventions, including an "Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments" (to replace
suspenders) and a history trivia game.
[34]
Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook; a dried
adhesive on the pages needed only to be moistened before use.
His book
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court features a
time traveler from the contemporary US, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to
Arthurian England. This type of storyline would later become a common feature of a
science fiction sub-genre,
alternate history.
In 1909,
Thomas Edison visited Twain at his home in Redding, Connecticut, and filmed him. Part of the footage was used in
The Prince and the Pauper (1909), a two-reel short film. It is said to have been the only known existing film footage of Twain.
[35]
Financial troubles
Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he
lost a great deal through investments, mostly in new inventions and
technology, particularly the
Paige typesetting machine.
It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers
when it worked, but it was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent $300,000
(equal to $8,200,000 in inflation-adjusted terms
[36]) on it between 1880 and 1894;
[37] but, before it could be perfected, it was made obsolete by the
Linotype. He lost not only the bulk of his book profits but also a substantial portion of his wife's inheritance.
[38]
Twain also lost money through his publishing house,
Charles L. Webster and Company, which enjoyed initial success selling the memoirs of
Ulysses S. Grant but went broke soon after, losing money on a biography of
Pope Leo XIII; fewer than two hundred copies were sold.
[38]
Twain's writings and lectures, combined with the help of a new friend, enabled him to recover financially.
[39] In 1893, he began a 15-year-long friendship with financier
Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of
Standard Oil. Rogers first made Twain file for
bankruptcy. Then Rogers had Twain transfer the
copyrights
on his written works to his wife, Olivia, to prevent creditors from
gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of
Twain's money until all the creditors were paid.
Twain accepted an offer from
Robert Sparrow Smythe[40] and embarked on a year-long, around-the-world lecture tour in July 1895
[41] to pay off his creditors in full, although he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so.
[42] It would be a long, arduous journey and he was sick much of the time, mostly from a cold and a
carbuncle. The itinerary took him to
Hawaii,
Fiji,
Australia,
New Zealand,
Sri Lanka,
India,
Mauritius,
South Africa and
England. Twain's three months in India became the centerpiece of his 712-page book
Following the Equator. He joined the
Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, in opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines.
[citation needed]
In mid-1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor
Hugh Gilzean-Reid at
Dollis Hill House, located on the north side of
London,
UK. In regard to Dollis Hill, Twain wrote that he had "never seen any
place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and
stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful,
and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world."
[43] He then returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.
Speaking engagements
Twain was in demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks similar to what would become
stand-up comedy.
[44] He gave paid talks to many men's clubs, including the
Authors' Club,
Beefsteak Club, Vagabonds,
White Friars, and Monday Evening Club of Hartford. In the late 1890s, he spoke to the
Savage Club in London and was elected honorary member. When told that only three men had been so honored, including the
Prince of Wales, he replied "Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine."
[45] In 1897, Twain spoke to the Concordia Press Club in Vienna as a special guest, following diplomat
Charlemagne Tower, Jr.. In German, to the great amusement of the assemblage,
Twain delivered the speech "
Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language").
[46] In 1901, Twain was invited to speak at
Princeton University's
Cliosophic Literary Society, where he was made an honorary member.
[47]
Later life and death
“ |
...the report is greatly exaggerated |
” |
—Mark Twain when it was reported he had died [48]
|
Twain passed through a period of deep
depression that began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of
meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.
[49] On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In 1906, Twain began his
autobiography in the
North American Review. In April, Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all she owned in the
1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed
portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith,
George Wharton James
visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session.
Initially resistant, Twain admitted that four of the resulting images
were the finest ones ever taken of him.
[50]
Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls he viewed as surrogate
granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so
members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain exchanged letters with his
"Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to
play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief
delight".
[51]
In 1907 Twain met Dorothy Quick (then aged 11) on a transatlantic
crossing, beginning "a friendship that was to last until the very day of
his death".
[52]
Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters (
D.Litt.) in 1907.
In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:
[53]
"I came in with Halley's Comet
in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.
It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with
Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these
two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out
together.' "
His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a
heart attack on April 21, 1910, in
Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
Upon hearing of Twain's death, President
William Howard Taft said:
[54][55]
- "Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to
millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions
yet to come ... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much
appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own
countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."
Twain's funeral was at the "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church in New York.
[56] He is buried in his wife's family plot at
Woodlawn Cemetery in
Elmira, New York.
The Langdon family plot where he is buried is marked by a 12-foot
(two fathoms, or "mark twain") monument, placed there by his surviving
daughter, Clara.
[57] There is also a smaller headstone. Although he expressed a preference for cremation (for example in
Life on the Mississippi), he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word.
Officials in Connecticut and New York estimated the value of Twain's
estate at $471,000 ($12,000,000 today); his manuscripts were given no
monetary value, and his copyrights given little and decreasing value.
[58]
Writing
Overview
Mark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his
D.Litt. degree, awarded to him by
Oxford University
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved
into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of
mankind. At mid-career, with
Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering
colloquial speech
and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature
built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been
suppressed at times for various reasons.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "
nigger," which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.
A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile
because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure
newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a
large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not
written down; thus, the collection of Twain's works is an ongoing
process. Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as
recently as 1995.
[38]
Early journalism and travelogues
While writing for the Virginia City newspaper, the
Territorial Enterprise in 1863, Clemens met lawyer
Tom Fitch, editor of the competing newspaper
Virginia Daily Union and known as the "silver-tongued orator of the Pacific."
[59]:51
He credited Fitch with giving him his "first really profitable lesson"
in writing. In 1866, Clemens presented his lecture on the Sandwich
Islands to a crowd in Washoe City, Nevada.
[60]
Clemens commented that, "When I first began to lecture, and in my
earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of
everything I saw and heard." Fitch told him, "Clemens, your lecture was
magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life
have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration.
But you committed one unpardonable sin—the unpardonable sin. It is a sin
you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by
which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest
interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the
really fine effect you had produced."
[61] It was in these days that Twain became a writer of the
Sagebrush School, and was known later as the most notable within this literary genre.
[62]
Twain's first important work, "
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was first published in the
New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was that his story arrived too late to be included in a book
Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the
wild American West.
After this burst of popularity, the
Sacramento Union
commissioned Twain to write letters about his travel experiences. The
first journey he took for this job was to ride the steamer
Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the
Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco
Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the
Panama isthmus.
All the while, Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and
forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8,
1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser
Quaker City for five months. This trip resulted in
The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress.
This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a
solemn scientific expedition it would have about it the gravity, that
profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper
to works of that kind, and withal so attractive.
Yet not withstanding it
is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to
the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he
looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who
traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing
anyone how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other
books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there
is no need.
In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature,
Roughing It, as a semi-sequel to
Innocents.
Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey from Missouri to Nevada, his subsequent life in the
American West, and his visit to Hawaii. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that
Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work kept
Roughing It's focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his
first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor
Charles Dudley Warner.
Twain's next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River.
Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1875, featured Twain's disillusionment with
Romanticism.
[63] Old Times eventually became the starting point for
Life on the Mississippi.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Twain's next major publication was
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal.
Tom Sawyer
was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John
Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role
Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.
The Prince and the Pauper, despite a
storyline
that is omnipresent in film and literature today, was not as well
received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same day who are
physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince
and pauper switch places.
Pauper was Twain's first attempt at
historical fiction, and blame for its shortcomings is usually put on
Twain for having not been experienced enough in English society, and
also on the fact that it was produced after a massive hit. In between
the writing of
Pauper, Twain had started
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had problems completing
[64]) and started and completed another travel book,
A Tramp Abroad, which follows Twain as he traveled through central and southern Europe.
Twain's next major published work,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first
Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States.
Huckleberry Finn was an offshoot from
Tom Sawyer and had a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind
Huckleberry Finn is the young boy's belief in the right thing to do though most believed that it was wrong. Four hundred manuscript pages of
Huckleberry Finn were written in mid-1876, right after the publication of
Tom Sawyer.
Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst
of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts
have Twain working on
Huckleberry Finn in tandem with
The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of
Huckleberry Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experienced, as critic
Leo Marx puts it, a "failure of nerve."
Ernest Hemingway once said of
Huckleberry Finn:
If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
Hemingway also wrote in the same essay:
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.[65]
Near the completion of
Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote
Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book.
[38]
The work recounts Twain's memories and new experiences after a 22-year
absence from the Mississippi. In it, he also states that "Mark Twain"
was the call made when the boat was in safe water – two
fathoms (12 feet or 3.7 metres).
Later writing
After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors
to keep them afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had
been having from his writing projects. Twain focused on President
Ulysses S. Grant's
Memoirs for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" for
The Century Magazine. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a
Confederate militia during the
Civil War. The name of his publishing company was
Charles L. Webster & Company, which he owned with Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage.
[66]
Twain in his later years
Twain next focused on
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. Written with the same
historical fiction style of
The Prince and the Pauper,
A Connecticut Yankee showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of
King Arthur.
The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later
until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.
To pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, Twain had
begun to write articles and commentary furiously, with diminishing
returns, but it was not enough. He filed for bankruptcy in 1894.
His next large-scale work,
Pudd'nhead Wilson,
was written rapidly, as Twain was desperately trying to stave off the
bankruptcy. From November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote 60,000
words for the novel.
[38]
Critics have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the
novel's rough organization and constant disruption of continuous plot.
There were parallels between this work and Twain's financial failings,
notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a
different person.
Like
The Prince and the Pauper, this novel also contains the
tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life.
Considering the circumstances of Twain's birth and Halley's Comet, and
his strong belief in the paranormal, it is not surprising that these
"mystic" connections recur throughout his writing.
The actual title is not clearly established. It was first published serially in
Century Magazine, and when it was finally published in book form,
Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared as the main title; however, the disputed "subtitles" make the entire title read:
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins.
[38]
Twain's next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
and dedicated to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work
he was most proud of, despite the criticism he received for it. The book
had been a dream of his since childhood. He claimed he had found a
manuscript detailing the life of
Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent.
[38]
This was another piece Twain was convinced would save his publishing
company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, quashed that
idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was
published nonetheless.
During this time of dire financial straits, Twain published several
literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. He famously
derided
James Fenimore Cooper in his article detailing Cooper's "
Literary Offenses."
He became an extremely outspoken critic of not only other authors, but
also other critics, suggesting that before praising Cooper's work,
Thomas Lounsbury,
Brander Matthews, and
Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it."
[67]
Other authors to fall under Twain's attack during this time period (beginning around 1890 until his death) were
George Eliot,
Jane Austen, and
Robert Louis Stevenson.
[68]
In addition to providing a source for the "tooth and claw" style of
literary criticism, Twain outlines in several letters and essays what he
considers to be "quality writing." He places emphasis on concision,
utility of word choice, and realism (he complains that Cooper's
Deerslayer
purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings). Ironically,
several of his works were later criticized for lack of continuity (
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and organization (
Pudd'nhead Wilson).
Twain's wife died in 1904 while the couple were staying at the
Villa di Quarto in
Florence; and, after an appropriate period of time, Twain allowed himself to publish some works that his wife, a
de facto editor and censor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works,
The Mysterious Stranger, depicting various visits of
Satan
to the Earth, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not
published in Twain's lifetime. There were three versions found in his
manuscripts, made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal, Eseldorf, and
Print Shop versions. Confusion among the versions led to an extensive
publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original
versions as Twain wrote them become available.
Twain's last work was
his autobiography,
which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off
on whims and tangents in non-chronological order. Some archivists and
compilers have rearranged the biography into more conventional forms,
thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book. The
first volume of autobiography, over 736 pages, was published by the
University of California in November 2010, 100 years after his death, as
Twain wished.
[69][70] It soon became an unexpected
[71] best seller,
[72] making Twain one of very few authors publishing new best-selling volumes in all three of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Censorship
Twain’s works have been subjected to censorship efforts. According to
Stuart (2013) “Leading these banning campaigns, generally, were
religious organizations or individuals in positions of influence – not
so much working librarians, who had been instilled with that American
“library spirit” which honored intellectual freedom (within bounds of
course). In 1905, the
Brooklyn Public Library banned both
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from the children's department because of their language.
[73]
Views
Twain's views became more radical as he grew older. He acknowledged
that his views changed and developed over his life, referring to one of
his favorite works:
When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin;
every time I have read it since, I have read it differently—being
influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ...
and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.[74]
Anti-imperialist
In the
New York Herald, October 15, 1900, he describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the
Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist":
I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ... Why
not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to
myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can
make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of
their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution
afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place
among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to
which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War],
and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the
people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those
people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in
their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having
the eagle put its talons on any other land.[75]
Before 1899, Twain was an ardent imperialist. In the late 1860s and
early 1870s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the
Hawaiian Islands.
[76]
In the mid-1890s he explained later, he was "a red-hot imperialist. I
wanted the American eagle to go screaming over the Pacific."
[77] He said the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought.
[78]
In 1899, he reversed course, and from 1901, soon after his return from
Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the
American Anti-Imperialist League,
[79] which opposed the annexation of the
Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members."
[30] He wrote many
political pamphlets for the organization. The
Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the
Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred
Moros
were killed. Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings
on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.
[79]
Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In
Following the Equator, Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes."
[30] He was highly critical of
European imperialism, notably of
Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the
British Empire, and of
Leopold II, King of the
Belgians.
[30] King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging
political satire about his private colony, the
Congo Free State.
Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to
widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first
large-scale
human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing
Christianity to
the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's
rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered, until the movement forced
Brussels to call a halt.
[80][81]
During the
Philippine-American War, Twain wrote a short
pacifist story entitled
The War Prayer,
which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of
love are incompatible with the conduct of war. It was submitted to
Harper's Bazaar for publication, but on March 22, 1905, the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a
woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend
Daniel Carter 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, Twain could not publish
The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923. It was republished as campaigning material by
Vietnam War protesters.
[30]
Twain acknowledged he originally sympathized with the more moderate
Girondins of the
French Revolution and then shifted his sympathies to the more radical
Sansculottes, indeed identifying as "a
Marat." Twain supported the
revolutionaries in Russia against the reformists, arguing that the
Tsar must be got rid of, by violent means, because peaceful ones would not work.
[82] He summed up his views of revolutions in the following statement:
I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by
breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the
revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were
some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.[83]
Civil rights
Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and emancipation of slaves, even going so far to say "
Lincoln's
Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also."
[84]
He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States,
once saying "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the
mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature ...
but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus
done to him."
[85] He paid for at least one black person to attend
Yale Law School and for another black person to attend a southern university to become a minister.
[86]
Twain's views on race were not reflected in his early sketches of
Native Americans. Of them, Twain wrote in 1870:
His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and
devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when
one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest
the reward be an arrow in the back. To accept of a favor from him is to
assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you
bankrupt yourself trying. The scum of the earth![87]
As counterpoint, Twain's essay on "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper" offers a much kinder view of Indians.
[67]
"No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's
Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous
creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his
Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them."
[88] In his later travelogue
Following the Equator (1897), Twain observes that in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by "
whites"
in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow,
slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey"; his
conclusion is that "there are many humorous things in this world; among
them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other
savages.".
[89]
In an expression that captures his Indian experiences, he wrote, “So
far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or
Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun
visits on his rounds. Where every prospect pleases, and only man is
vile.”
[90]
Twain was also a staunch supporter of
women's rights and an active campaigner for
women's suffrage. His "
Votes for Women" speech, in which he pressed for the granting of voting rights to women, is considered one of the most famous in history.
[91]
Helen Keller
benefited from Twain's support, as she pursued her college education
and publishing, despite her disabilities and financial limitations.
Labor
Twain wrote glowingly about
unions in the river boating industry in
Life on the Mississippi, which was read in union halls decades later.
[92] He supported the
labor movement, especially one of the most important unions, the
Knights of Labor.
[30] In a speech to them, he said:
Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a
handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed?
The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the
workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.[93]
Vivisection
Twain was opposed to the
vivisection practices of his day. His objection was not on a scientific basis but rather an
ethical one. He specifically cited the pain caused to the animal as his basis of his opposition.
[94]
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that
are profitable to the human race or doesn't. ... The pain which it
inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it,
and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking
further.
Religion
Although Twain was a
Presbyterian, he was sometimes critical of
organized religion and certain elements of
Christianity
through his later life. He wrote, for example, "Faith is believing what
you know ain't so," and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he
would not be—a Christian."
[95]
Nonetheless, as a mature adult he engaged in religious discussions and
attended services, his theology developing as he wrestled with the
deaths of loved ones and his own mortality.
[96] His own experiences and suffering within his family made him particularly critical of "
faith healing," such as espoused by
Mary Baker Eddy and
Christian Science.
[citation needed]
Twain generally avoided publishing his most
heretical opinions on religion in his lifetime, and they are known from essays and stories that were published later. In the essay
Three Statements of the Eighties in the 1880s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages,
revelations,
holy scriptures such as the
Bible,
Providence, or retribution in the
afterlife. He did state that "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works," but also that "
the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws," which determine "small matters," such as who dies in a pestilence.
[97]
At other times he wrote or spoke in ways that contradicted a strict
deist view, for example, plainly professing a belief in Providence.
[98] In some later writings in the 1890s, he was less optimistic about the
goodness of God, observing that "if our Maker
is
all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind." At other
times, he conjectured sardonically that perhaps God had created the
world with all its tortures for some purpose of His own, but was
otherwise indifferent to humanity, which was too petty and insignificant
to deserve His attention anyway.
[99]
In 1901 Twain criticized the actions of
missionary Dr.
William Scott Ament (1851–1909) because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the
Boxer Uprising of 1900. Twain's response to hearing of Ament's methods was published in the
North American Review in February 1901:
To the Person Sitting in Darkness, and deals with examples of
imperialism in China, South Africa, and with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.
[100] A subsequent article, "To My Missionary Critics" published in
The North American Review in April 1901, unapologetically continues his attack, but with the focus shifted from Ament to his missionary superiors, the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
[101]
After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work that was
especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably
Letters from the Earth, which was not published until his daughter
Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to
Soviet propaganda about the withholding.
[102] The anti-religious
The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916.
Little Bessie, a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection
Mark Twain's Fables of Man.
[103]
Despite these views, he raised money to build a
Presbyterian Church
in Nevada in 1864, although it has been argued that it was only by his
association with his Presbyterian brother that he did that.
[104]
Twain created a reverent portrayal of
Joan of Arc, a subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing.
[105] In 1900 and again in 1908, he stated, "I like
Joan of Arc best of all my books, it is the best."
[105][106]
Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the
subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he
believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a
life beyond."
[107]
Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final work
Autobiography of Mark Twain, the publication of which started in November 2010, 100 years after his death. In it, he said:
[108]
There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody,
merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is—in our country
particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified
degree—it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the
Bible, with its prodigious crime—the invention of Hell. Measured by our
Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and
hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor
qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion.
The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent
blood it has spilled.
Twain was a
Freemason.
[109][110] He belonged to Polar Star Lodge No. 79 A.F.&A.M., based in St. Louis. He was initiated an
Entered Apprentice on May 22, 1861, passed to the degree of
Fellow Craft on June 12, and raised to the degree of
Master Mason on July 10.
Pen names
Twain used different
pen names
before deciding on "'Mark Twain". He signed humorous and imaginative
sketches as "Josh" until 1863. Additionally, he used the pen name
"Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.
[111]
He maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two
fathoms, a depth indicating safe water for passage of boat, was measured on the
sounding line. Twain is an
archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain."
[112]
The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark
twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two
[fathoms]," that is, "The water is 12 feet (3.7 m) deep and it is safe
to pass."
Twain claimed that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In
Life on the Mississippi, he wrote:
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; ... 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.[113]
Twain's story about his pen name has been questioned by biographer George Williams III,
[114] the
Territorial Enterprise newspaper,
[115] and
Purdue University's Paul Fatout.
[116]
The claim is that "mark twain" refers to a running bar tab that Twain
would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in
Virginia City, Nevada.
Legacy
Twain's legacy lives on today as his namesakes continue to multiply. Several schools are named after him, including
Mark Twain Elementary School in
Wheeling, Illinois, and
Mark Twain Elementary School in
Houston, Texas, which has a statue of Twain sitting on a bench. There is also
Mark Twain Intermediate School in New York. There are several schools named
Mark Twain Middle School in different states, as well as Samuel Clemens High School in
Schertz, near
San Antonio, Texas. There are also other structures, such as the
Mark Twain Memorial Bridge.
Mark Twain Village is a United States Army installation located in the
Südstadt district of
Heidelberg, Germany. It is one of two American bases in the
United States Army Garrison Heidelberg that house American soldiers and their families (the other being
Patrick Henry Village).
Awards in his name proliferate. In 1998, The
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts created the
Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually. The
Mark Twain Award
is an award given annually to a book for children in grades four
through eight by the Missouri Association of School Librarians.
Stetson University in
DeLand, Florida sponsors the Mark Twain Young Authors' Workshop each summer in collaboration with the
Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal. The program is open to young authors in grades five through eight.
[117] The museum sponsors the Mark Twain Creative Teaching Award.
[118]
Twain's house, "Stormfield", in Redding, Connecticut (front view)
Buildings associated with Twain, including some of his many homes,
have been preserved as museums. His birthplace is preserved in
Florida, Missouri. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in
Hannibal, Missouri
preserves the setting for some of the author's best known work. The
home of childhood friend Laura Hawkins, said to be the inspiration for
his fictional character Becky Thatcher, is preserved as the "Thatcher
House." In May 2007, a painstaking reconstruction of the home of Tom
Blankenship, the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn, was opened to the
public. The family home he had built in Hartford, Connecticut, where he
and his wife raised their three daughters, is preserved and open to
visitors as the
Mark Twain House.
Asteroid 2362 Mark Twain was named after him.
On December 4, 1985, the
United States Postal Service
issued a stamped envelope for "Mark Twain and Halley's Comet," noting
the connection with Twain's birth, his death, and the comet.
[119] On June 25, 2011, the Postal Service released a
Forever stamp in his honor.
[120]
Depictions
Twain is often depicted wearing a white suit. While there is evidence
that suggests that, after Livy's death in 1904, Twain began wearing
white suits on the lecture circuit, modern representations suggesting
that he wore them throughout his life are unfounded. However, there is
evidence showing him wearing a white suit before 1904. In 1882, he sent a
photograph of himself in a white suit to 18-year-old
Edward W. Bok, later publisher of the
Ladies Home Journal,
with a handwritten dated note on verso. It did eventually become his
trademark, as illustrated in anecdotes about this eccentricity (such as
the time he wore a white summer suit to a Congressional hearing during
the winter).
[38] McMasters'
The Mark Twain Encyclopedia states that Twain did not wear a white suit in his last three years, except at one banquet speech.
[121]
Actor
Hal Holbrook created a one-man show called
Mark Twain Tonight, which he has performed regularly for about 59 years.
[122] The broadcast by
CBS in 1967 won him an
Emmy Award. Of the three runs on
Broadway (1966, 1977, and 2005), the first won him a
Tony Award.
Twain was portrayed by
Fredric March in the 1944 film
The Adventures of Mark Twain. He was later brought to life by
James Whitmore in the (similarly titled) 1985
Will Vinton Claymation film
The Adventures of Mark Twain. In the two-part
Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "
Time's Arrow Pt. 1 & 2",
the crew of the starship Enterprise pursues malevolent alien lifeforms
through a time portal to 1893 San Francisco, where their secretive
actions arouse the suspicions of Samuel Clemens as played by
Jerry Hardin.