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Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens]
Keynotes
Born: Florida, Monroe County, Missouri, 30th
November 1835.
Died: Redding, Connecticut, 21st April 1910.
American journalist, novelist and short-story
writer.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on the 30th
November 1835 in the southern state of Missouri in the USA. He was the sixth
child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens.
John
Marshall was a lawyer and a shopkeeper, and was involved in local
politics.
When he was four years old, Samuel's
family moved to Hannibal, a small town in County Marion, Missouri, on the
banks of the Mississippi River.
Samuel's
childhood was a mixture of boyish adventures exploring the Mississippi,
fishing and discovering the natural world; and the stark reality of
frontier life. When Samuel was just four years old one of his
sisters died; when he was seven, his ten-year-old brother died; and when
he was eleven, his father died. From then on Samuel had to work to
help support his family.
His early jobs
included delivery boy, clerk and blacksmith's assistant. He left
school at the age of thirteen and became an apprentice to a printer.
One
of Samuel's brothers, Orion, ten years his senior, set up a newspaper
called the Hannibal Journal and employed Samuel as the compositor,
and later as a contributor using the pen-name "Rambler".
At
the age of eighteen he left Hannibal determined to see the world and
headed for St. Louis. For a while he worked as a journeyman printer
drifting through New York, Philadelphia and Washington before travelling
west to Iowa.
In Muscatine, Iowa he worked for
his brother again as a typesetter, returned to St. Louis for a short
while, and then joined his brother in Keokuk, Iowa where he managed to
settle for almost two years.
At the age of
twenty-two, the restless young Samuel decided to explore South America and
set out for the Amazon having agreed to send letters describing his
travels back to the Keokuk Daily Post. Despite leaving with
the best intentions, he got no further than the Mississippi before he was
distracted by a steamboat pilot named Horace Bixby who took him on as an
apprentice.
For two years he worked with Bixby
and studied the ways of the river, before gaining his own pilot's licence
in 1859. He plied the Mississippi for a further two years before the
Civil War started. With the river divided by the conflict, the
traffic between north and south came to an end.
Samuel
Clemens stayed for a time in New Orleans, but in 1861 he moved again, this
time to Nevada where his brother, Orion, had been made Secretary to the
Nevada Territory. After a brief period of unsuccessful gold and
silver prospecting, Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City
Territorial Enterprise.
The name 'Mark
Twain' made its first appearance on 3rd February 1863 in Virginia City,
Nevada, when Samuel Clemens was just twenty-seven years old. The
name was a riverman's term for a stretch of water which was barely safe
for navigation.
In the spring of 1864 he had a
disagreement with the editor of a rival newspaper, and such was the social
nature of Nevada at the time that it was necessary for him to leave
town. He went to California where he continued to write his incisive
humour, but having upset the police in San Francisco with a series of
articles about political corruption, Clemens took refuge in the Tuolumne
Hills at Angels Camp where he worked as a pocket-miner.
In
1866 the Pacific Steamboat Company began operating a passenger service
between San Francisco and Honolulu, and Mark Twain went on the journey as
a correspondent for the Sacramento Union.
In
1867 he travelled to New York via Panama on the first leg of a voyage
around the world, writing letters as he went for publication in the Alta
California and the New York Tribune. These letters were
compiled to form The Innocents Abroad... in 1869.
After his return to the USA, he served as secretary
to a senator in Washington for a short while before concentrating on his
career as a public lecturer.
Samuel Clemens
married Olivia Langdon on 2nd February 1870, and with money from his
father-in-law, he bought a partnership in the Buffalo Express.
In
September 1871 they moved to Hartford, Connecticut where they built a
large house which was to be their home for the next twenty years, and in
which they were to bring up their three daughters.
Samuel
continued his lecture tours, visiting England in 1872 and 1873, and by the
late 1870s his writing career had taken off. The lectures helped to
sell the books, and the books helped to sell the lectures.
In
1884 he established his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and
Company.
In the late 1880s he became patron to
an inventor named James W. Paige who was developing a typesetting
machine. Samuel Clemens invested large sums in the project over
several years, but by 1891 he was starting to suffer financially. To
save money he closed his large house in Connecticut and took his family to
Europe.
In 1894 the typesetting machine
finally proved commercially unviable. Although its design was good,
it failed to gain a foothold in the market before a superior rival machine
was developed. In the same year the Webster company collapsed and
Samuel Clemens was left with massive debts.
He
was saved from bankruptcy by an executive of the Standard Oil Company,
Henry Huttleston Rogers, who took control of Samuel's financial affairs
and arranged a world lecture tour to pay his debts. Rogers also
arranged the publication of The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson in
1894 and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc the following year.
The
world lecture tour began in the summer of 1895 and covered venues ranging
from Australia to England. He was in London when he received news
that his eldest daughter Susy had died. The family remained abroad
for five years, and he described the tour in Following the Equator
(1897).
By 1898 he was financially solvent
again, but it wasn't until 1900 that he returned with his family to the
USA and took up residence in New York.
He
received three honorary degrees: one from Yale University in 1901, one
from the University of Missouri in 1902, and a third from Oxford
University in 1907.
In 1903 Samuel and Olivia
moved to Florence in Italy to help Olivia's poor health, but she died
early in 1904.
In 1908 Samuel built a new
house in Redding, Connecticut. He named this house 'Stormfield' and
it was there that he died on 21st April 1910.
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Quotes
"Soap and Education are
not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long
run."
The Facts Concerning the
Recent Resignation
"Guides cannot master
the subtleties of the American joke." The
Innocents Abroad... "Cauliflower
is nothing but cabbage with a college education." Pudd'nhead
Wilson's Calendar "This
poor little one-horse town." The
Undertaker's Chat "A
classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody
wants to read." The
Disappearance of Literature [a speech] "The
report of my death was an exaggeration." [In
a telegram from Europe to the Associated Press}
Links
The Millennium Library - Mark Twain
http://www.millenniumlibrary.co.uk/millib/reference/
notes.php?entry=Mark%20Twain&fromdb=2
Spartacus - Mark Twain
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAtwain.htm
Mark Twain Circle of America - Mark Twain Circular
http://www.citadel.edu/faculty/leonard/mtcircular.htm
Mark Twain Circle of New York
http://salwen.com/mtahome.html
The Mark Twain House
http://www.marktwainhouse.org/
1UpInfo - Mark Twain
http://www.1upinfo.com/encyclopedia/T/Twain-Ma.html
Hannibal.net - Mark Twain
http://www.hannibal.net/twain/index.shtml
Mark Twain Museum
http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/
Works with publication
dates: Novels: The
Gilded Age (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
The Tragedy of
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
The Mysterious Stranger (published posthumously in 1916) Tales
and Sketches: The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867)
Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old (1875)
The Stolen White Elephant and Other Stories (1882)
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other Stories (1893)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches (1900)
A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906) Travel
Sketches: The Innocents Abroad;
or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
Following the Equator (1897) Other
Works: Mark Twain's
(Burlesque) Autobiography (1871)
Roughing It (1872)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897)
To the Person Sitting in the Darkness (1901)
Extracts from Adam's Diary (1904)
King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905)
Eve's Diary (1906)
What is Man? (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909)
Mark Twain's Autobiography (unfinished, published in 1924)
Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1962)
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