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Mark Twain

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Samuel Clemens
BornNovember 30, 1835
Florida, Missouri
DiedApril 21, 1910
Redding, Connecticut
Pen nameMark Twain
OccupationHumorist, novelist, writer
NationalityAmerican
GenreHistorical fiction, non-fiction, satire

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30 1835 – April 21 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.

Although Twain was confounded by financial and business affairs, his humor and wit were keen, and he enjoyed immense public popularity. At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. In 1907, crowds at the Jamestown Exposition thronged just to get a glimpse of him. He had dozens of famous friends, including William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, and Henry Huttleston Rogers. Fellow American author William Faulkner is credited with writing that Twain was "the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs." Twain died in 1910 and is buried in Elmira, New York.

History

The Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri

Growing Up

Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. When he was four, his family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River which later served as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersberg in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Missouri had been admitted as a slave state in 1821 as part of the Missouri Compromise, and from an early age Twain was exposed to the institution of slavery, a theme which Twain was to later explore in his work. In 1847, when Twain was 11, his father fell ill with pneumonia and died that March. As a teenager Twain worked as an apprentice printer; when he was sixteen, he began writing humorous articles and newspaper sketches. When he was eighteen he left Hannibal, working as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. At the age of 22, Twain returned to Missouri and worked as a riverboat pilot and earned $250 which was a "princely amount" back then, until trade was interrupted by the American Civil War in 1861.

Roughing it out West

Missouri, although a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, declined to join the Confederacy and remained loyal to the Union. When the war began, Clemens and his friends formed a Confederate militia (an experience he depicted in his 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), but he saw no military action and the militia disbanded after two weeks. His friends joined the Confederate Army; Clemens joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, and headed west. They traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. On the way they visited the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. Clemens' experiences in the West contributed significantly to his formation as a writer, and became the basis of his second book, Roughing It.

Once in Nevada, Clemens became a miner, hoping to strike it rich discovering silver in the Comstock Lode. He stayed for long periods in camp with his fellow prospectors—another life experience that he later put to literary use. After failing as a miner, Clemens obtained work at a newspaper called the Daily Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, where he adopted the pen name "Mark Twain" which meant 2 fathoms, or 12 feet.

Pen names

Clemens usually maintained that his primary pen name, "Mark Twain," came from his years on the riverboat, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or "safe water" was measured on the sounding line and marked by calling "mark twain". However, the name may also have come from his wilder days in the West, where he would buy two drinks and tell the bartender to "mark twain" on his tab. The complete origin of the pseudonym is unknown.

Clemens is also known to have used the pen of his most famous pen name, Twain himself later 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; and thus far, they contained no poison.

[...]
I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a "cub" at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the "New Orleans True Delta." It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print.
[...]

He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed Mark Twain to anything. 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.[1]

Regardless of the source of the name, "Mark Twain" was "born" as Clemens' pen name in the office of the Nevada Territorial Enterprise, when Clemens first used the name on an article published on February 3, 1863. Twain wants the reader to see the absurdity in his statement.

Career overview

Twain's greatest contribution to American literature is generally considered to be his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Ernest Hemingway once said:

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. ...all American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Also popular are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the non-fiction book Life on the Mississippi.

Beginning as a writer of light, humorous verse, Twain evolved into a grim, almost profane 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 in a way that is almost unrivaled in world literature.

Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech, and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language.

Twain in the lab of Nikola Tesla, spring of 1894

Twain also had a fascination with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent quite a bit of time together (in Tesla's laboratory, among other places). Such fascination can be seen in Twain's book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which features a time traveler from the America of Twain's day, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. Incidentally this features as an element of inspiration in the popular 1990s science fiction serial Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Five: Last Episode and Season Six: Episode One] 'Time's Arrow' where Twain is encountered and inspired by the arrival of the future Enterprise bridge officers investigating hostile alien interference in Earth's history. Twain also patented an improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments.

From 1901 until his death in 1910, Twain was vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League.[2] The League opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. Twain wrote Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. Many but not all of Mark Twain's neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.

In recent years, there have been occasional attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn from various libraries because Twain's use of local color is offensive to some people. Although Twain was against racism and imperialism far ahead of the public sentiment of his time, those who have only superficial familiarity with his work have sometimes condemned it as racist because it accurately depicts language in common use in the 19th-century United States. Expressions that were used casually and unselfconsciously then are often perceived today as racist (today, such racial epithets are far more visible and condemned). Twain himself would probably be amused by these attempts; in 1885, when a library in Concord, Massachusetts banned the book, he wrote to his publisher, "They have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash suitable only for the slums', that will sell 25,000 copies for us for sure."

Many of Mark Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. 1880 saw the publication of an anonymous slim volume entitled 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. Twain was among those rumored to be the author, but the issue was not settled until 1906, when Twain acknowledged his literary paternity of this scatological masterpiece.

At least Twain saw 1601 published during his lifetime. During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote an anti-war article entitled The War Prayer. Through this internal struggle, Twain expresses his opinions of the absurdity of slavery and the importance of following one's personal conscience before the laws of society. 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 Dan 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, Mark Twain could not publish The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923.

In later years, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story.

Perhaps most controversial of all was Mark Twain's 1879 humorous talk at the Stomach Club in Paris, entitled Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism, which concluded with the thought, "If you must gamble your lives sexually, don't play a lone hand too much." This talk was not published until 1943, and then only in a limited edition of fifty copies.


Trivia

  • Twain had a birthmark above his right pectoral which he dubbed "Mr. Cantankerous".
  • In 1906, his daughter Clara Clemens married the Jewish Russian emigre pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Clara was a singer who appeared with her husband in recital. Twain and Gabrilowitsch share a gravestone in Elmira, N.Y.
  • The 1944 biographical film of his life, The Adventures of Mark Twain, featured Fredric March as Clemens and Alexis Smith as his wife Olivia.
  • Broadway, television & cinema actor Hal Holbrook has been performing his one-man show Mark Twain Tonight ! annually since 1959, with each show somewhat different in Twain content. During the 60th Tony Awards, Holbrook reported that he was purported to be buried near Twain in Woodlawn Cemetery. Holbrook then repeated one of Twain's famous quotes: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
  • The webcomic series Achewood features Mark Twain as a character in one of the strip' s story arcs. This arc features a narrative written in an imitation of Mark Twain's style, as Twain journals his encounter with two of the strip's central characters, who time-traveled from the modern day to the late 19th-century.
  • Mark Twain`s wife, Olivia Langdon, was known as Livy to her family and friends.
  • Mark Twain was opposed to vivisection of any kind, not on a scientific basis, but rather an ethical one, in which he states that no sentient being should unconsentingly be made to suffer for another.

"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. ... The pain which it inficts upon unconsenting animal is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."

Epigrams

  • "A habit cannot be thrown out the window, it must be coaxed down the stairs one step at a time."
  • "A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar."
  • "A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. "
  • "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. "
  • "'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read."
  • "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
  • "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. "
  • "Familiarity breeds contempt—and babies."
  • "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
  • "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times."
  • "Golf is a good walk spoilt."
  • "I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough "
  • "I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education."
  • "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt."
  • "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them."
  • "Jesus died to save men -- a small thing for an immortal to do, & didn't save many, anyway; but if he had been damned for the race that would have been act of a size proper to a god, & would have saved the whole race. However, why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?"
  • "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great."
  • "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
  • "Never put off until tomorrow that which could be done the day after tomorrow."
  • "October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February."
  • "Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."
  • "Respect your superiors, if you have any."
  • "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
  • "Suppose you were a congressman, and suppose you were an idiot. But I repeat myself."
  • "The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."
  • "The human race is a race of cowards, and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner."
  • The saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" is sometimes attributed to Twain. He did not coin the phrase, but he did popularize it in the United States.
  • "There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice."
  • "To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add sheep was a tautology."
  • "Truth is our most valuable commodity, so let us economize."
  • "We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God." (Corn-Pone Opinions)
  • "When angry count to four, when very angry, swear." -Puddin'head Wilson's Calendar
  • "When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane, not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic—for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his... When I look around me, I am often troubled to see how many people are mad." [3]

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Life on the Mississippi, chapter 50
  2. ^ Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (1992, Jim Zwick, ed.) ISBN 0815602685
  3. ^ Christian Science by Mark Twain; full text ebook here

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mark Twain.
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Mark Twain
Wikiquote has quotations related to Mark Twain.

Works by Mark Twain

Studying Twain

Twain's Life

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