Pen name of Samuel Clemens, best known for works set on the Mississippi River,
including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain was an outstanding localcolor writer, one
whose skills lay in capturing the peculiar characters, humor, mannerisms, and settings of
American regions. Twain was born and grew up in Missouri, learning journalism and printing from his
brother. He had a short-lived career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River just
before the Civil War. Then he accompanied his brother west to Nevada and California,
working as a reporter and writer from 1861 to 1866. He eventually married and settled in
Elmira, New York, and later in Hartford, Connecticut, although he traveled widely.
Twain was a charter member of the American Folklore Society in 1888, along with a
few other American authors such as Edward Eggleston and Joel Chandler Harris. Twain
was already aware of the popular interest in American folklore. In 1882 he had met Joel
Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable in New Orleans and proposed a national
tour, with each author speaking and reading from his own (folklore-based) works. Harris
refused because he was too shy for stage appearances, but Twain and Cable did tour from
November 1884 to February 1885. Like the other writers who helped form the American
Folklore Society, however, Twain dropped out after only a few years, probably because
the scientific interests of the society s ethnologists did not coincide with his own
interests.
Many of Twain’s publications are of interest to folklorists. He is widely known for his
ability with tall tales (such as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and, in
Roughing It (1872), “Grandfather’s Old Ram”) as well as humorous tales on himself
(such as “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” and “The Story of a Speech”).
His works not only include examples of many forms of folklore, but also point out their
value in regional cultures. The forms he recorded and commented on range widely, from
folk speech to folk customs, from folk art to folk games. His masterpiece, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, is a storehouse of folklore. The book’s plot begins with a folk belief
(Huck’s flicking a spider into a candle, killing it, and, therefore, causing bad luck—and
his feelings of helplessness in not knowing how to avoid the bad luck). Later chapters
contain many other examples of fblklore, from the “witch-riding” of Jim in Chapter 2 to a
list of “signs” in Chapter 8. In fact, Huckleberry Finn is arguably a work about folklore,
preferring it to Tom Sawyer s “booklearning.”
Twain captured in his works the sense of humor, character types, and customs of the
West and Mississippi River region. Twain’s works gave folklore prominence and
demonstrated how rich and significant folklore is in American culture.
Eric L.Montenyohl
References
Hoffman, Daniel. 1961. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kaplan, Justin. 1966. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster.
LeMaster, J.R., and James D.Wilson. 1993. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland.