Portrait of Samuel Clemens as a young man holding a printer’s composing stick with letters “SAM” (29 November 1850).
Three American authors awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature—Eugene O’Neill in 1936, William Faulkner in 1949, and Ernest Hemingway in 1954—testified to the lasting importance of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain. O’Neill declared that Twain was the “true father of all American literature,” Faulkner pronounced him “the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs,” and Hemingway asserted that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Such praise is unrivaled in American literary history, a fact perhaps all the more surprising given Twain’s modest beginning and long apprenticeship as a printer, river pilot, miner, and journalist.
The sixth of seven children born to working-class parents, Twain and his family moved thirty miles from the Salt River hamlet of Florida, Missouri, to Hannibal, Missouri, in 1839. Twain’s boyhood in the small port town on the Mississippi River was one of his most formative influences. It “colored his whole subsequent life,” as he once allowed, and he featured it in his semi-autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883) and the model of the villages of St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huck Finn (1885) and Dawson’s Landing in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). Though his formal schooling ended soon after his father’s death in 1847, Twain became a printer’s devil or tyro for a local newspaper. If, as Herman Melville declared, the whaleship was “my Yale and Harvard,” then the print shop was Mark Twain’s Princeton and Columbia. He later worked for his brother Orion’s Hannibal Journal as a printer and assistant editor before leaving Hannibal to work as an itinerant typesetter from 1853 to 1857 in St. Louis, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, and Muscatine and Keokuk, Iowa.
He changed his careers at the age of twenty-one in 1857 by becoming a cub pilot on the lower Mississippi under the tutelage of Captain Horace Bixby. After a regimen of study he later compared to “the efforts needed to acquire the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at a university,” Twain earned his pilot’s licences in 1859 and remained on the river until 1861, when the river was closed to commercial traffic by the start of the Civil War. After a two-week stint in a Missouri militia, Twain lit out for the territories in July 1861 when brother Orion was appointed secretary of Nevada Territory by President Abraham Lincoln. Soon after his arrival Twain traveled to the Esmerelda and Humboldt mining regions, where he prospected for silver and gold. He also began to submit occasional articles to Nevada papers. including the Virginia City, Nev., Territorial Enterprise. In September 1862 he starts to work on salary with the Territorial Enterprise and moved to the Comstock. In May 1864 he left for San Francisco and briefly became city editor of the San Francisco Call, a job he detested After quitting at the invitation of one of the owners, he became the San Francisco correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise and spent a season as a miner in Tuolumne and Calaveras Counties, California, where he heard the “jumping frog” sketch he rewrote for publication by the New York Saturday Press and San Francisco Californian. He was hired by the Sacramento Union to promote tourism and trade by contributing travel essays from Hawaii between March and July 1866. Upon his return, he inaugurated his career as a paid public speaker by touring California and Nevada with his lecture on the Sandwich Islands. He sailed for New York toward the close of the year to take advantage of the wider literary opportunities available to him there.
In June 1867, after serving as a correspondent of the New York Weekly and several other newspapers, Twain joined the company of sightseers who voyaged to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, the first organized tour of its kind. He financed his trip by sending a series of over fifty travel letters to the San Francisco Alta California and other newspapers. After his return to New York in November 1867, he revised this correspondence for publication by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, under the title The Innocents Abroad (1869), which became his first bestseller. Much as he had launched a speaking tour upon his return from Hawaii, he began to deliver his lecture “The American Vandal Abroad” soon after the publication of his first travelogue.
By the mid-1880s, Twain was increasingly occupied by the publishing business he had established and named for his nephew and its president, Charles L. Webster. Unfortunately, the most successful books issued by the company were the first two: Huck Finn and PersonalMemoirs of U. S. Grant (1885). By the early 1890s, the company was in economic straits, in no small part because Twain had invested heavily in an advanced typesetting machine and subsidized its development for years, though in the end it was a financial failure, outmoded by the cheaper and more efficient linotype machine. Twain was advised and assisted by his friend Henry Huddleston Rogers, vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, and he published a knot of works in 1889-1896: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The American Claimant (1892), Merry Tales (1892), “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” (1893), “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” (1893),“The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance” (1893), “Travelling with a Reformer” (1893), “The Californian’s Tale” (1893), The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories (1893), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1893-94), “In Defense of Harriet Shelley” (1894), “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894), Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), “How to Tell a Story” (1895), “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” (1895), “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895-1896), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). But all to no avail. Webster & Co.filed for bankruptcy in April 1894, its end hastened by the financial Panic of 1893. Twain repaid all the creditors and recouped his lost fortune by embarking on a round-the-world speaking tour across North America, to Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. On the basis of this journey, he also wrote and published his fifth and final travelogue entitled Following the Equator in the U.S. and More Tramps Abroad (1897) in the U.K.
Many of these works were based on more his reading than his own past experience, including the medieval fantasy Connecticut Yankee; a parody of the “Higher Criticism” of biblical scholarship, “Adam’s Diary” (1893); the Tom-Huck sequels; and the hagiography of Joan of Arc. Even Pudd’nhead Wilson, though set in a reimagined Hannibal, contains elements of modern detective fiction and its plot turns on a clue Twain gleaned from Francis Galton’s Finger Prints (1892). Ironically, however, even as his reputation grew, Twain became the target of some librarians and other custodians of culture who tried and sometimes succeeded in censoring his writings, particularly Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, by removing them from the shelves of public libraries in such towns as Concord, Mass., Denver, Des Moines, and Brooklyn.
Appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, 15 (October 1898), 5.
Twain’s final years were punctuated by a series of disappointments and personal tragedies. His daughter Susy died in Hartford from spinal meningitis in August 1896 soon after Twain, Livy, and Clara arrived in London at the close of their trip around the world. The family never fully recovered from her death. They remained in Europe—first England, later rural Switzerland and Vienna—until October 1900, returning to the U.S. only after living most of the previous decade abroad. Livy’s fragile health began to decline until she was often quarantined. A corresponding shift toward social satire occurred in Twain’s brand of humor, as in his sardonic tale “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899) and acerbic essay “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy” (1899). Long a political “mugwump” or independent, he became at the turn of the century an outspoken critic of imperialism, whether by Britain in South Africa, Russia in Manchuria, Belgium in the Congo, or the U.S. in the Philippines, particularly in such pieces as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), “The Czar’s Soliloquy” (1905), and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905). He ridiculed the New York City corruption of Tammany Hall and the political authority wielded by the Church of Christian Science and voiced his fear it would become an American state religion. He condemned lynch law in the South, though he suppressed his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” lest it damage his literary sales, and he embargoed the publication of “The Mysterious Stranger” (written 1897-1908), “Letters from the Earth” (written 1904-1909), and most of his autobiography (dictated 1906-1909) so that he could freely express opinions without jeopardizing the income his heirs would earn from his literary estate.
Twain also continued to travel widely during the last decade of his life. Invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Missouri in June 1902, he enjoyed a sentimental journey back to Hannibal, Columbia, and St. Louis. On the advice of Livy’s physicians, the Clemens clan decamped in October 1903 to a villa near Florence, Italy, where Livy died in June 1904. He returned to the U.S. for her funeral, summered in the Berkshires, and settled that fall near Washington Square Park in New York. Invited to receive an honorary LL.D. from Oxford University—what he considered the highest honor of his life—he sailed to England in June 1907 and was feted there for three weeks. Throughout this period, of course, Twain continued to write for publication: “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902), a parody of the Sherlock Holmes fiction; “Eve’s Diary” (1905), a companion to “Adam’s Diary”; and What Is Man? (1906), his deterministic “bible,” first issued in a limited edition and without signature; “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1907-1908), a pioneering work of science fiction; and Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), his contribution to the debate over the authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Twain was also active in lobbying the U.S. Congress to enact copyright reform as a member of the American Copyright League. He also enrolled a dozen or so pre-pubescent girls, so-called “angelfish” or honorary granddaughters, in an “aquarium” of visitors and correspondents.
At the suggestion of his official biographer and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937), Twain bought a farm in rural Connecticut in 1906 and built a mansion there modeled on an Italian villa and designed by John Mead Howells, the son of his friend W. D. Howells (1837-1920). He christened the mansion “Stormfield,” after the story he sold to Harper’s Monthly to finance the final stages of its construction. His daughter Clara married the Russian-born musician Ossip Gabrilowitch there in October 1909 and his daughter Jean died there from a heart attack while bathing on Christmas Eve 1909. Twain died there of congestive heart failure on 21 April 1910 and his body was interred in the Clemens family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York.
SUGGSTED READINGS
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010-2015. 3 vols.
Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira College <https://marktwainstudies.com>.
Clemens, Clara. My Father, Mark Twain. New York: Harper & Bros., 1931.
Kaplan, Justin. Mark Twain and Mr. Clemens. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.
Lawton, Mary. A Lifetime with Mark Twain: The Memories of Katy Leary. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925.
Loving, Jerome. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010.
Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, ed. Gary Scharnhorst. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2006.
Mark Twain Annual. 2003 to present. Online at JSTOR <https://www.jstor.org/journal/marktwaij> and Project Muse <https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/603>.
Mark Twain Journal: The Author and His Era. 1936 to present. Online at JSTOR < https://www.jstor.org/journal/marktwainj>.
Mark Twain Project Online <https://www.marktwainproject.org>.
Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1976.
Mark Twain’s Letters, 1853-1875, ed. Edgard Marquess Branch et al. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988-2002. 6 vol.
Moffett, Samuel E. “Mark Twain: A Biographical Sketch,” McClure’s, 13 (October 1899), 523-29.
The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Gregg Camfield. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003.
Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Random House, 2005.
Railton, Stephen. Mark Twain in His Times <https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/index2.html>.
Scharnhorst, Gary. The Life of Mark Twain. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2018-2022. 3 vols.
Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. Scharnhorst. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2010.
Wallace, Elizabeth. Mark Twain and the Happy Island. Chicago: McClurg, 1914.
Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico and editor of the journal American Literary Realism. He is the former president of the Western Literature Association and former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. He is also the author of over a hundred scholarly articles and author or editor of over sixty books, including Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (University of Alabama Press) and the three-volume Life of Mark Twain (University of Missouri Press).
Professor Scharnhorst has participated in a large number of CMTS events and lectures, including:
- Gary Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain: Social Satirist” (May 1, 2024 – Quarry Farm Barn)
- Gary Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain’s Interviews: The Final Report” (October 10, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)