Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, a
riverboat term for water that is just deep enough for navigation. He
wrote some of the most famous works in American literature, including
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Clemens had literary and financial success and failure during his long career, and died a bitter man in 1910.
Early life
Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens, was a lawyer and businessman. His mother
was Jane (Lampton) Clemens. When Samuel was four, the family of four boys and two girls moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the
Mississippi River.
Three river steamboats stopped in Hannibal daily when Clemens
was young. His childhood involved adventures on rafts, in swimming
holes, and in woods and caves. These carefree pursuits ended abruptly at
age twelve, when Clemens’s father died. This forced Clemens to work as
a typesetter to help support his family.
Clemens eventually worked for one of his brothers, Orion Clemens,
who owned several newspapers. When the business failed, Clemens traveled throughout the Midwest and East for three years, selling nonfiction
to newspapers. He then rejoined Orion in the newspaper business, this
time in Keokuk, Iowa.
A dream fulfilled
In 1857, Clemens left Keokuk. He planned to travel to the Amazon
River, in South America, to make a fortune growing cocoa. Before leaving America, however, he befriended a steamboat captain named Horace
Bixby (1826–1912). Clemens trained with Bixby for the next two years
and, in 1859, obtained his own pilot’s license.
Clemens’s years on the Mississippi River provided much material for
his writing. After the beginning of the American Civil War (1861–65),
the Union army closed the Mississippi River to private boats so that it
could be used as an invasion route instead. Clemens served in the
Confederate States of America army for a few weeks, then moved to
Nevada, where Orion was working in the territorial government.
Clemens spent a year in Nevada panning for precious metal. The experience gave him material for a novel he would write, Roughing It, published in 1872. In 1862, he moved to Virginia City, Nevada, to write for
the newspaper Territorial Enterprise. There he began to write regularly
under the pen name Mark Twain. A dispute with a fellow journalist
caused Clemens to flee to San Francisco, California, and a dispute there
with the police caused him to flee to the Sierra Mountains, near the
California-Nevada border.
Literary success and marriage
When he returned to San Francisco from the Sierras, Clemens wrote a
satiric story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
The story was published widely and was well received by readers and critics. Success allowed Clemens to spend the rest of the 1860s traveling and
writing for various publications. In the book The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, Clemens gave a humorous account of Americans on a
five-month tour through Europe and the Middle East.
During the tour, Clemens met a wealthy man named Charles
Langdon. While visiting Langdon in New York City and finishing his
book, Clemens fell in love with Langdon’s sister, Olivia. They married on
February 2, 1870, and had a son (who died as a toddler) and three
daughters.
The Clemens family soon settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where
they lived for twenty years. Their neighbors included Harriet Beecher
Stowe (1811–1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After completing
Roughing It, Clemens was paid to do a lecture tour in England. Lecture
tours were important sources of money over the remainder of his career.
Back in Connecticut, Clemens wrote a novel with neighbor Charles
Dudley Warner (1829–1900) called The Gilded Age. Another tour in
England followed. Clemens was on the verge of publishing what would
become his most popular works.
The masterpieces
In Hartford, Clemens began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is
the story of young Tom Sawyer’s escapades with his friend Huckleberry
Finn and his girlfriend Becky Thatcher. Published in 1876, the book was
immensely popular with readers of all ages, and well regarded by literary
critics.
Clemens next began to work on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Picking up where the prior book ended, it tells the story of Finn’s journeys on the Mississippi River with a runaway slave named Jim. Many literary critics, including writer Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961),
consider it to be among the best books in American literature. In it,
Clemens used specific, local manners of speech for the different characters. Some critics consider the book to be a masterful statement against
slavery, though others say it is just a white man’s inaccurate account of
an African American slave.
Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885. Between Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, Clemens published fiction and nonfiction that resulted in strong critical reviews but mixed sales. In 1882, he returned to the Mississippi River, traveling on a steamboat piloted by his old teacher,
Bixby, and then published the nonfiction Life on the Mississippi, which
sold poorly. His financial woes climbed as he invested in a publishing
company and a new typesetting device, both of which eventually failed.
Later years
Clemens’s writing was always humorous. In the later years of his life,
however, he became increasingly critical of humanity. Later novels included A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889,
and The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the Comedy of Those
Extraordinary Twins, published in 1894. He revisited the Sawyer and
Finn characters in 1894 in Tom Sawyer Abroad, by Huck Finn.
In 1896, Clemens’s second child, Olivia Susan, became ill with
meningitis and died. Clemens’s wife Olivia, who battled poor health
throughout their marriage, died in 1904. Their daughter Jean drowned
in 1909, and daughter Clara eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.
The tragedies embittered Clemens.
In 1906, Clemens began to dictate his autobiography to his literary
executor. He continued to be paid for lecture tours until settling in New
York City and then Redding, Connecticut, for his final years. His humor
was often malicious and pessimistic, founded on an extreme dissatisfaction with humanity. He died near Redding on April 21, 1910. His works
remain an enduring and beloved part of American literature.