Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Mark Twain, detail of photo by Mathew Brady, February 7, 1871
Born	November 30, 1835(1835-11-30) Florida, Missouri, U.S.
Died	April 21, 1910 (aged 74) Redding, Connecticut, U.S.
Pen name	Mark Twain
Occupation	Writer, lecturer
Nationality	American
Genres	Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism
Notable work(s)	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Spouse(s)	Olivia Langdon Clemens (1868-1904)
Children	Langdon, Susy, Clara, Jean
Influences Artemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Thomas Paine, Robert Henry Newell, Josh Billings, Alexander Carlyle, [1] Pliny, Herodotus, Plutarch, William Dean Howells, Robert Browning[2]
Influenced Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Hal Holbrook, Jimmy Buffett, Ron Powers, Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey, Robert A. Heinlein[1]
Signature

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),^[3] better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel,^[4] and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is extensively quoted.^[5][6] During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain enjoyed immense public popularity. His keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".^[7]

Biography

Early life

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798 – March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803 – October 27, 1890).^[8] He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brother Orion (July 17, 1825 – December 11, 1897; Henry, who died in a riverboat explosion (July 13, 1838 - June 21, 1858); and Pamela (September 19, 1827 – August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830 – August 17, 1839) died when Twain was three years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832 – May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months.^[9] Twain was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet.

When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri,^[10] a port town on the Mississippi River that served as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[11] At that time, Missouri was a slave state, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.

In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.^[12] The next year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school.^[13] At 22, Twain returned to Missouri.

The library of the Mark Twain House, which features hand-stenciled paneling, fireplaces from India, embossed wallpapers and an enormous hand-carved mantel that the Twains purchased in Scotland (HABS photo)

On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,^[14] roughly equivalent to $155,000 a year today. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.

While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,^[15] which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.^[16] Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. He continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.

Missouri was a slave state, considered by many to be part of the South, and was represented in both the Confederate and Federal governments during the Civil War. Years later, Twain wrote a sketch, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", which claimed he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding their company.^[17]

Travels

1874 engraving of Twain

Twain joined his brother, Orion, who in 1861 had been appointed secretary to James W. Nye, the territorial governor of Nevada, and headed west. Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences inspired Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner.^[17] Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.^[18] It was here that he first used his famous pen name. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain".^[19]

Twain then moved to San Francisco, California in 1864, where he continued working as a journalist. He was attributed with the quote, "The Coldest Winter he ever spent in his life, was a Summer in San Francisco". He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. The young poet Ina Coolbrith may have romanced him.^[20]

His first great success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. It was an immediate hit and brought him national attention. A year, he traveled to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.^[21]

In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were later compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It was on this trip that he met his future brother-in-law.

Marriage and children

Charles Langdon showed Twain a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. The two met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York.^[21] She came from a "wealthy but liberal family", and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women's rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and the writer and utopian socialist William Dean Howells,^[22] who became a longtime friend.

The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express newspaper, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.

In 1871,^[23] Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873, he arranged the building of a home (local admirers saved it from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned it into a museum focused on him). There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962)^[24] and Jean (1880-1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.

During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874-1891), Twain wrote many of his best-known works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book A Tramp Abroad. His tour included an extended stay in Heidelberg, Germany, from May 6 until July 23, 1878 and a visit to London.

Love of science and technology

Twain in the lab of Nikola Tesla, spring of 1894

He was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Twain's inventions included a bed clamp for infants, a new type of steam engine, and the kaolatype (or collotype, a machine designed to engrave printing plates). He patented an improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments. Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook: a dried adhesive on the pages only needed to be moistened before use.

His book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. Some suggest this makes Twain a pioneer in the science fiction genre.

Financial troubles

Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he squandered much of it in bad investments, mostly in new inventions, particularly the Paige typesetting machine. It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent the enormous sum of $300,000 (equivalent to almost $7,000,000 in 2007 dollars) on it, but before it could be perfected, it was made obsolete by the Linotype. He lost not only the bulk of his book profits but also a large portion of the inheritance of his wife Livy.^[25]

Twain also lost money through his publishing house, which enjoyed initial success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant but went broke soon after, losing money on the idea that the general public would be interested in a biography of Pope Leo XIII. Fewer than two hundred copies were sold.^[25]

Twain's writings and lectures, combined with the help of a new friend, enabled him to recover financially.^[26] In 1893, he began a 15-year-long friendship with financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil. Rogers first made Twain file for bankruptcy. Then Rogers had Twain transfer the copyrights on his written works to his wife, Olivia, to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all the creditors were paid.

Twain then embarked on an around-the-world lecture tour to pay off his creditors in full, despite the fact that he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so.^[27] In the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world".^[28] He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.

Clubs

Twain was in demand as a featured speaker, and appeared before a number of men's clubs, including the White Friars, the Vagabonds, the Authors, the Monday Evening Club of Hartford, and the Beefsteak Club. He was made an honorary member of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. In the late 1890s, he spoke to the Savage Club in London and was elected honorary member. When told that only three men had been so honored, including the Prince of Wales, he replied "Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine."^[29] In 1897, Twain spoke to the Concordia Press Club in Vienna as a special guest, following diplomat Charlemagne Tower. In German, to the great amusement of the assemblage, Twain delivered the speech "Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language").^[30]

In 1906, Twain formed a club of girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain received and wrote letters his "Angel Fish" girls, and invited them to concerts and theatre, and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight."^[31]

Later life

Mark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his DLitt degree, awarded to him by Oxford University

Twain passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909 deepened his gloom.^[32] On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly.

In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. In April, Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith lost nearly all she owned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith, George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session. Twain said four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him.^[33]

Oxford University awarded Twain a Doctorate in Letters in 1907.

In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:^[34]

His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.

Upon hearing of Twain's death, President William Howard Taft said:^[35][36]

Mark Twain headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Twain is buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. His grave is marked by a 12-foot monument, placed there by his surviving daughter, Clara.^[37] There is also a smaller headstone.

Writing

Overview

Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse but 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. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger", which was a common term when the book was written.

Unfortunately, a complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, many believe that a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or simply were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain's works is an ongoing process. Researchers have rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995.^[25]

Early journalism and travelogues

Cabin in which Twain wrote Jumping Frog of Calaveras, located on Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County.^[38] Historical marker and interior view available.

Twain's first important work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was that his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.

After this burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which was to ride the steamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while, Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City for five months. This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress.

In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work kept Roughing It's focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.

Twain's next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, featured Twain’s disillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the starting point for Life on the Mississippi.

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

The Prince and the Pauper, despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and literature today, was not as well received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. Pauper was Twain's first attempt at fiction, and blame for its shortcomings is usually put on Twain for having not been experienced enough in English society, and also on the fact that it was produced after such a massive hit. In between the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had problems completing^[39]) and started and completed another travel book, A Tramp Abroad, which follows Twain as he travels through central and southern Europe.

Twain's next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. Huckleberry Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy's belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in the summer of 1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Huckleberry Finn in tandem with The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of Huckleberry Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experiences—as critic Leo Marx puts it—a "failure of nerve". Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: “If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.”^[40]

Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book.^[25] The work recounts Twain's memories and new experiences after a 22-year absence from the Mississippi. In it, he also states that "Mark Twain" was the call made when the boat was in safe water—two fathoms.

Later writing

After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing projects. Twain focused on President Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" for The Century Magazine. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a Confederate militia during the Civil War. The name of his publishing company was Charles L. Webster & Company, which he owned with Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage.^[41]

Twain in his old age

Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. Written with the same "historical fiction" style of The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of King Arthur. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.

Twain had begun to furiously write articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, but it was not enough. He filed for bankruptcy in 1894.

His next large-scale work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was written rapidly, as Twain was desperately trying to stave off the bankruptcy. From November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote a staggering 60,000 words for the novel.^[25] Critics have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the novel's rough organization and constant disruption of continuous plot. There were parallels between this work and Twain's financial failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a different person.

Like The Prince and the Pauper, this novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life. Considering the circumstances of Twain's birth and Halley's Comet and his strong belief in the paranormal, it is not surprising that these "mystic" connections recur throughout his writing.

The actual title is not clearly established. It was first published serially in Century Magazine, and when it was finally published in book form, Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared as the main title; however, the disputed "subtitles" make the entire title read: The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins.^[25]

Twain's next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work of which he was most proud, despite the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream of his since childhood; he claimed that he had found a manuscript detailing the life of Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent.^[25] This was another piece which Twain was convinced would save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, squashed that idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was published nonetheless.

During this time of dire financial straits, Twain published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. He famously derided James Fenimore Cooper in his article detailing Cooper's "Literary Offenses". He became an extremely outspoken critic not only of other authors, but also of other critics, suggesting that before praising Cooper's work, Professors Loundsbury, Brander Matthes, and Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it".^[42]

Other authors to fall under Twain's attack during this time period (beginning around 1890 until his death) were George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.^[43] Some have noticed a trend in literary criticism to mimic Twain's style, as contemporary critics often blast not merely portions of a work, opting instead to insult and belittle an author's entire bibliography. It appears that Twain was the first to use such language in describing established authors (and these authors were often quite popular at the time Twain was lambasting them). In addition to providing a source for the "tooth and claw" style of literary criticism, Twain outlines in several letters and essays what he considers to be "quality writing". He places particular emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism (he complains that Cooper's Deerslayer purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings). Ironically, several of his works were later criticized for lack of continuity (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and organization (Pudd'nhead Wilson).

Twain's wife died in 1904 while the couple were staying at the Villa di Quarto in Florence, and after an appropriate time Twain allowed himself to publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and censor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which places the presence of Satan, also known as “No. 44”, in various situations where the moral sense of humankind is absent, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime. There were three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal, Eseldorf, and Print Shop versions. Confusion between the versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original versions as Twain wrote them become available.

Twain's last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Some archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book.

Friendship with Henry H. Rogers

While Twain credited Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive, with saving him from financial ruin, their close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial. When Twain lost three of his four children and his beloved wife, the Rogers family increasingly became a surrogate family for him. He became a frequent guest at their townhouse in New York City, their 48-room summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and aboard their steam yacht, the Kanawha.

A late life friendship for each, Mark Twain and Henry Huttleston Rogers in 1908

The two men introduced each other to their acquaintances. Twain was an admirer of the remarkable deafblind girl Helen Keller. He first met Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan at a party in the home of Laurence Hutton in New York City in the winter of 1894. Twain introduced them to Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for Keller's education at Radcliffe College. It was Twain who is credited with labeling Sullivan, Keller's governess and companion, a "miracle worker". His choice of words later became inspiration for the title of William Gibson's play and film adaptation, The Miracle Worker. Twain also introduced Rogers to journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who interviewed the robber baron for a muckraking expose that led indirectly to the break-up of the Standard Oil Trust. On cruises aboard the Kanawha, Twain and Rogers were joined at frequent intervals by Booker T. Washington, the famed former slave who had become a leading educator.

While the two famous old men were widely regarded as drinking and poker buddies, they also exchanged letters when apart, and this was often since each traveled a great deal. Unlike Rogers' personal files, which have never become public, these insightful letters were published.^[44] The written exchanges between the two men demonstrate Twain's well-known sense of humor and, more surprisingly, Rogers' sense of fun, providing a rare insight into the private side of the robber baron.

In April 1907, Twain and Rogers cruised to the opening of the Jamestown Exposition in Virginia. Twain's public popularity was such that many fans took boats out to the Kanawha at anchor in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. As the gathering of boats around the yacht became a safety hazard, he finally obliged by coming on deck and waving to the crowds.

Because of poor weather conditions, the steam yacht was delayed for several days from venturing into the Atlantic Ocean. Rogers and some of the others in his party returned to New York by rail; Twain disliked train travel and so elected to wait and return on the Kanawha. However, reporters lost track of his whereabouts; when he failed to return to New York City as scheduled, The New York Times speculated that he might have been "lost at sea". Upon arriving safely in New York and learning of this, the humorist wrote a satirical article about the episode, offering to "...make an exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious public".^[45] This bore similarities to an earlier event in 1897 when he made his famous remark "The report of my death is an exaggeration", after a reporter was sent to investigate whether he had died. In fact, it was his cousin who was seriously ill.

Later that year, Twain and Rogers's son, Henry Jr., returned to the Jamestown Exposition aboard the Kanawha. The humorist helped host Robert Fulton Day on September 23, 1907, celebrating the centennial of Fulton's invention of the steamboat. Twain, filling in for ailing former U.S. President Grover Cleveland, introduced Rear Admiral Purnell Harrington. Twain was met with a five-minute standing ovation; members of the audience cheered and waved their hats and umbrellas. Deeply touched, Twain said, "When you appeal to my head, I don't feel it; but when you appeal to my heart, I do feel it".^[46]

In April 1909, the two old friends returned to Norfolk, Virginia for the banquet in honor of Rogers and his newly completed Virginian Railway. Twain was the keynote speaker in one of his last public appearances, and was widely quoted in newspapers across the country.^[47]

A month later, Twain was en route from Connecticut to visit his friend in New York City when Rogers died suddenly on May 20, 1909. Twain arrived at Grand Central Station to be met by his daughter with the news. Stricken with grief, he uncustomarily avoided news reporters who had gathered, saying only "This is terrible...I cannot talk about it". Two days later, he served as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral in New York City. However, he declined to join the funeral party on the train ride for the interment at Fairhaven. He said "I cannot bear to travel with my friend and not converse".

Views

While his reputation as a popular author overshadows his contributions as a social critic, Twain held strong views on the political topics of his day; his friend Helen Keller had her radicalism similarly neutralized by history. Through his wife's family, Twain had contact with many well-placed progressives. He spent the last twenty years of his life as an "outspoken anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist".^[22] He did, however, make capital investments with the aim of profiting from them, albeit with little success.^[48]

Changing his views

Although Twain remained neutral during the Civil War, his views became more radical as he grew older. He acknowledged that his views changed and developed over his life, referring to one of his favorite works:

When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.^[49]

In the New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900, he describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist":

I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.^[50]

Anti-imperialism

From 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League,^[51] which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members".^[22] He wrote many political pamphlets for the organization. The Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.^[52]

Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In Following the Equator, Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes".^[22] He was highly critical of European imperialism, notably of Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the British Empire, and of Leopold II, King of the Belgians.^[22] King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging political satire about his private colony, the Congo Free State. Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.^{[citation needed]}

Pacifist or revolutionary?

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.^[53]

During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote a pacifist story 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 Daniel Carter 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, Twain could not publish The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923. It was republished as campaigning material by Vietnam War protesters.^[22]

Twain supported the revolutionaries in Russia against the reformists, arguing that the Tsar must be got rid of, by violent means, because peaceful ones would not work.^[54]

Abolition, emancipation, and anti-racism

Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and emancipation, even going so far to say “Lincoln's Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.”^[55] He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying “I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature....but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him.”^[56] He paid for at least one black person to attend Yale University Law School and for another black person to attend a southern university to become a minister.^[57]

Women's rights

Mark Twain was a staunch supporter of women's rights and an active campaigner for women's suffrage. His "Votes for Women" speech, in which he pressed for the granting of voting rights to women, is considered one of the most famous in history.^[58]

Native Americans

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Twain's liberal views on race did not extend to his earliest sketches of Native Americans. Of them, Twain wrote in 1870:

His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back. To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. The scum of the earth!^[59]

As counterpoint, Twain's essay on "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper" offers a much kinder view of actual Indians. "No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them".^[60]

Labor unions

He wrote glowingly about unions in the riverboating industry in Life on the Mississippi, which was read in union halls decades later.^[61] He supported the labor movement in general, especially one of the most important unions, the Knights of Labor.^[62] In a speech to them, he said:

Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.^[63]

Vivisection

Twain was opposed to vivisection of any kind, not on a scientific basis but rather an ethical one.^[64]

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

Religion

Twain was critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through most of his later life. In 1901 Twain was opposed to the actions of missionary Dr. William Scott Ament (1851–1909) as a consequence of reports that Ament and other missionaries collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Twain's response to hearing of Ament's methods was published in the North American Review in February 1901: To the Person Sitting in Darkness', and deals with examples of imperialism in China, South Africa, and with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. ^[65] A subsequent article, "To My Missionary Critics" published in The North American Review in April 1901, unapologetically continues his attack, but with the focus shifted from Ament to his missionary superiors, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.^[66]

Twain wrote, for example, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so", and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian".^[67]

After his death, 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 his daughter Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding.^[68] The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, though there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story. Little Bessie, a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection Mark Twain's Fables of Man.^[69] Twain's funeral was at the "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church in New York.^[70] He also donated funds to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada.^[71]

Freemasonry

Twain was a Freemason.^[72][73] He belonged to Polar Star Lodge No. 79 A.F.&A.M., based in St. Louis. He was initiated an Entered Apprentice on May 22, 1861, passed to the degree of Fellow Craft on June 12, and raised to the degree of Master Mason on July 10.

Legacy

A statue of Mark Twain at Mark Twain Elementary School in the Braeswood Place neighborhood of Houston, Texas

Twain's legacy lives on today as his namesakes continue to multiply. Several schools are named after him, including Mark Twain Elementary School in Houston, Texas, which has a statue of Twain sitting on a bench, and Mark Twain Intermediate School in New York. There are several schools named Mark Twain Middle School in different states, as well as Samuel Clemens High School in Schertz, near San Antonio, Texas. There are also other structures, such as the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge.

Mark Twain Village is a United States Army installation located in the Südstadt district of Heidelberg, Germany. It is one of two American bases in the United States Army Garrison Heidelberg that house American soldiers and their families (the other being Patrick Henry Village).

Awards in his name proliferate. In 1998, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts created the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually. The Mark Twain Award is an award given annually to a book for children in grades four through eight by the Missouri Association of School Librarians. Stetson University in DeLand, Florida sponsors the Mark Twain Young Authors' Workshop each summer in collaboration with the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal. The program is open to young authors in grades five through eight.^[74] The museum sponsors the Mark Twain Creative Teaching Award.^[75]

A plaque honoring Mark Twain on the Sydney Writers Walk in Sydney, Australia

Buildings associated with Twain, including some of his many homes, have been preserved as museums. His birthplace is preserved in Florida, Missouri. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri preserves the setting for some of the author's best-known work. The home of childhood friend Laura Hawkins, said to be the inspiration for his fictional character Becky Thatcher, is preserved as the "Thatcher House".In May 2007, a painstaking reconstruction of the home of Tom Blankenship, the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn, was opened to the public. The family home he had built in Hartford, Connecticut, where he and his wife raised their three daughters, is preserved and open to visitors as the Mark Twain House.

Actor Hal Holbrook created a one-man show called Mark Twain Tonight, which he has performed regularly for 50 years. The broadcast by CBS in 1967 won him an Emmy Award. Of the three runs on Broadway (1966, 1977, and 2005), the first won him a Tony Award.

Additionally, like countless influential individuals, Twain was honored by having an asteroid, 2362 Mark Twain, named after him.

Often, Twain is depicted in pop culture as wearing an all-white suit. While there is evidence that suggests that, after Livy's death in 1904, Twain began wearing white suits on the lecture circuit, modern representations suggesting that he wore them throughout his life are unfounded. There is no evidence of him wearing a white suit before 1904; however, it did eventually become his trademark, as illustrated in anecdotes about this eccentricity (such as the time he wore a white summer-suit to a Congressional hearing during the winter).^[25] McMasters' "Mark Twain Encyclopedia" states that Twain did not wear a white suit in his last three years, except at one banquet speech.^[76]

Pen names

Twain used different pen names (pseudonyms or "noms de plume") before deciding on "Mark Twain". He signed humorous and imaginative sketches "Josh" until 1863. Additionally, he used the pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.^[77]

He maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating "safe water" for the boat to float over, was measured on the sounding line. A fathom is a maritime unit of depth, equivalent to two yards (1.8 m); "twain" is an archaic term for "two". The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "there are 12 feet (3.7 m) of water under the boat and it is safe to pass".

Twain claimed that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In Life on the Mississippi, he wrote:^[78]

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; ... 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.

Twain's version of the story regarding his nom de plume has been questioned by biographer George Williams III,^[79] the Territorial Enterprise newspaper^[80] and Purdue University's Paul Fatout.^[81] which claim that "mark twain" refers to a running bar tab that Twain would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in Virginia City, Nevada.

Bibliography

• (1867) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (fiction)
• (1868) General Washington's Negro Body-Servant (fiction)
• (1868) My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (fiction)
• (1869) The Innocents Abroad (non-fiction travel)
• (1870-71) Memoranda (monthly column for The Galaxy magazine)
• (1871) Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (fiction)
• (1872) Roughing It (non-fiction)
• (1873) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (fiction, made into a play)
• (1875) Sketches New and Old (fictional stories)
• (1876) Old Times on the Mississippi (non-fiction)
• (1876) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (fiction)
• (1876) A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (fiction); (1945, private edition), (2001, Atlantic Monthly).
• (1877) A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (stories)
• (1877) The Invalid's Story (Fiction)
• (1878) Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (fiction)
• (1880) A Tramp Abroad (travel)
• (1880) 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (fiction)
• (1882) The Prince and the Pauper (fiction)
• (1883) Life on the Mississippi (non-fiction (mainly))
• (1884) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (fiction)
• (1889) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (fiction)
• (1892) The American Claimant (fiction)
• (1892) Merry Tales (fiction)
• (1892) Those Extraordinary Twins (fiction)
• (1893) The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (fictional stories)
• (1894) Tom Sawyer Abroad (fiction)
• (1894) The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (fiction)
• (1896) Tom Sawyer, Detective (fiction)
• (1896) Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (fiction)
• (1897) How to Tell a Story and other Essays (non-fictional essays)
• (1897) Following the Equator (non-fiction travel)
• (1898) Is He Dead? (play)
• (1900) The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (fiction)
• (1900) A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (essay)
• (1901) The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (satire)
• (1901) Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (political satire)
• (1901) To the Person Sitting in Darkness (essay)
• (1901) To My Missionary Critics (essay) The North Atlantic Review 172(April 1901) http://www.antiimperialist.com/templates/Flat/img/pdf2/ToMissCritics.pdf
• (1902) A Double Barrelled Detective Story (fiction)
• (1904) A Dog's Tale (fiction)
• (1904) Extracts from Adam's Diary (fiction)
• (1905) King Leopold's Soliloquy (political satire)
• (1905) The War Prayer (fiction)
• (1906) The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (fiction)
• (1906) What Is Man? (essay)
• (1906) Eve's Diary (fiction)
• (1907) Christian Science (non-fiction)
• (1907) A Horse's Tale (fiction)
• (1909) Is Shakespeare Dead? (non-fiction)
• (1909) Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (fiction)
• (1909) Letters from the Earth (fiction, published posthumously)
• (1910) Queen Victoria's Jubilee (non-fiction)
• (1912) My Platonic Sweetheart (dream journal, possibly non-fiction)
• (1916) The Mysterious Stranger (fiction, possibly not by Twain, published posthumously)
• (1923) The United States of Lyncherdom (essay, published posthumously)
• (1924) Mark Twain's Autobiography (non-fiction, published posthumously)
• (1935) Mark Twain's Notebook (published posthumously)
• (1962) Letters from the Earth (posthumous, edited by Bernard DeVoto)
• (1969) No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (fiction, published posthumously)
• (1985) Concerning the Jews (published posthumously)
• (1992) Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Jim Zwick, ed. (Syracuse University Press) ISBN 0-8156-0268-5 (previously uncollected, published posthumously)
• (1995) The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (published posthumously)
• (2009) Who is Mark Twain? (HarperStudio) ISBN 9780061735004 (previously unpublished, published posthumously)

See also

• Bernard DeVoto
• Regionalism (literature)
• American realism
• Warsaw Signal
• List of premature obituaries

References

Further reading

External links

Find more about Mark Twain on Wikipedia's sister projects: Definitions from Wiktionary

Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews

Learning resources from Wikiversity

Works by Mark Twain

• Mark Twain Project Online
• Works by Mark Twain at Project Gutenberg. More than 60 texts are freely available.
• Works by or about Mark Twain in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It. From The Atlantic Monthly. Nov. 1874: 591-594. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., November 1874. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., November 1874.
• Free to read on a cell phone - Twain works.
• Mark Twain Quotes
• Mark Twain Quotes, Newspaper Collections and Related Resources
• Full text of My Platonic Sweetheart , a dream journal by Mark Twain
• Punch, Brothers, Punch! – text of this famous work
• Essays by Mark Twain at Quotidiana.org
• Twain on The Awful German Language
• Mark Twain on Scientific Research / Pains of Lowly Life (1900)
• Audiobooks of Twain's Writings from Librivox

Academic studies

• The Mark Twain Papers and Project of the Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. Home to the largest archive of Mark Twain's papers and the editors of a critical edition of all of his writings.
• Buffalo Library Mark Twain Room, which houses the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn
• The University of California Press^{[dead link]} Publishers of the critical edition of Mark Twain's writings.
• Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies
• "The Mark Twain they didn’t teach us about in school", by Helen Scott, from International Socialist Review 10, Winter 2000, pp.61–65.
• Mark Twain Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Life

• Full text of the biography Mark Twain by Archibald Henderson
• Obituary in San Francisco Call
• Mark Twain at Find a Grave
• The Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT
• The Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, MO
• The Hannibal Courier Post A Look at the Life and Works of Mark Twain
• Mark Twain: Known To Everyone—Liked By All, a Ken Burns film shown on PBS.
• Mark Twain's Mississippi at Northern Illinois University Libraries

Other

• Ever the Twain Shall Meet, a guide to Mark Twain on the Web
• Literary Pilgrimages—Mark Twain sites
• "Origins of the name Mark Twain", from Encyclopaedia Britannica latest edition, full article.
• PBS Twain Interactive Scrapbook and San Francisco Chronicle article documenting that Clemens did not say "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco".
• The Fountain Pens used by Mark Twain
• Images of First Appearances of Mark Twain Works
• article and rare pictures of Mark Twain and photographer Napoleon Sarony
• Google map with placemarks for places in America associated with Twain

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