Twain, Mark,

Samuel Langhorne Clemens,

Early Life and Works

After the death of his father in 1847, young Clemens was apprenticed to a printer in Hannibal, Mo., the Mississippi River town where he spent most of his boyhood. He first began writing for his brother's newspaper there, and later he worked as a printer in several major Eastern cities. In 1857, Clemens went to New Orleans on his way to make his fortune in South America, but instead he became a Mississippi River pilot—hence his pseudonym, "Mark Twain," which was the river call for a depth of water of two fathoms. The Civil War put an end to river traffic, and in 1862 Clemens went west to Carson City, Nev., where he failed in several get-rich-quick schemes. He eventually began writing for the Virginia City Examiner and later was a newspaperman in San Francisco.

Soon the humorist "Mark Twain" emerged, a writer of tall tales and absurd anecdotes. He first won fame with the comic masterpiece "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press and later (1867) used as the title piece for a volume of stories and sketches. When he returned from a trip to Hawaii financed by the Sacramento Union in 1866, Twain became a successful humorous lecturer. The articles he wrote on a journey to the Holy Land were published in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., and settled down in Hartford, Conn., to be "respectable," although Roughing It (1872) presented anecdotes of his less genteel past on the Western frontier.

Mature Works

In Hartford, Twain wrote some of his best work: The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel written with Charles Dudley WarnerWarner, Charles Dudley,
1829–1900, American editor and author, b. Plainfield, Mass., grad. Hamilton College, 1851, LL.B. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1858. After practicing law in Chicago, he was associate editor and publisher of the Hartford, Conn., Courant.
..... Click the link for more information.  about materialism and corruption in the 1870s; two evocations of his boyhood in Hannibal, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); The Prince and the Pauper (1882), a novel for children that blends the simplicity of a fairy tale with realistic social criticism; and the nonfictional Life on the Mississippi (1883). He also produced a travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which satirical overtones reflect a profound seriousness.

Later Life and Works

Some of Twain's later works are forced attempts at humor—The American Claimant (1892) and two sequels to Tom Sawyer. His distinctly bitter Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) underscores his increasingly melancholy attitude. Over the years Twain had invested a great deal of money in unsuccessful printing and publishing ventures, and in 1893 he found himself deeply in debt. To recoup his losses he wearily lectured his way around the world, being funny at whatever cost, and recording his experiences in Following the Equator (1897).

His later life was shadowed by the deaths of two of his daughters and by the long illness and death in 1904 of his wife. Some critics think that the fierce pessimism of his later works derives from these tragedies. Whatever the reason, he abandoned the optimistic tone of The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and wrote such somber works as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), What Is Man? (1905), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and Letters from the Earth (1962). The strange contradiction in personality between the genial humorist and the declared misanthrope has long intrigued commentators and makes Twain a fascinating biographical subject.

Twain's Masterpiece: Huckleberry Finn

Twain's literary reputation rests most particularly on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In its hero, a resourceful, unconventional boy with an innate sense of human values, Twain created one of the most memorable characters in fiction. The narrative device of a raft carrying Huck and a runaway slave down the Mississippi enabled Twain to achieve a realistic portrait of American life in the 19th cent. Through his use of authentic vernacular speech he revolutionized the language of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American writers. In 1990 a handwritten manuscript of the first half of the novel was discovered that includes a number of minor changes and an episode that was left out of the original published version; these passages were included in an edition published in 1996.

Bibliography

See his collected letters, ed. by E. M. Branch et al. (1987); his correspondence with William Dean Howells, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (1967); his notebooks, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (3 vol., 1975–80); editions of his rambling, dictated autobiography, ed. by A. B. Paine (1924, repr. 2003), by C. Neider (1959), and by H. E. Smith et al. (3 vol., 2010–15); biographies by A. B. Paine (1924), J. Kaplan (1966, repr. 2003), H. Hill (1973, repr. 2010), A. Hoffman (1997), F. Kaplan (2003), R. Powers (2005), and J. Loving (2010); studies by W. D. Howells (1910), B. De Voto (1932), H. N. Smith (1967), V. W. Brooks (rev. ed. 1933, repr. 1970), W. Gibson (1976), R. Morris, Jr. (2010 and 2015), G. Scharnhorst (2010), and A. Levy (2015); F. Anderson and K. M. Sanderson, ed., Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage (1972); S. F. Fishkin, ed., The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (2010); H. L. Katz and the Library of Congress, Mark Twain's America (2014).

Noted American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), c. 1885. Hulton Archive/Qetty Images.

Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835–1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, the third son and fifth child of John Marshall Clemens and Sarah Lampton. When he was four years old, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri. He received little schooling; attending a “dame school” and then two “common schools” for a while. His father died when he was twelve and his schooling came to an end when he started work as an apprentice to a printer. He later worked for his older brother Orion, who became a newspaper publisher. Clemens contributed some humorous pieces to Orion’s Journal. In 1853, Clemens set out as an itinerant printer and started to work his way eastward, as far as New York City and Philadelphia.

In 1856, Clemens started on a trip down the Mississippi River, planning to travel to South America. On the riverboat, he became fascinated by Horace Bixby, the boat’s pilot. He apprenticed himself to Bixby and gave up the idea of South America. Within eighteen months, Clemens became licensed as a riverboat pilot.

Less than a year later, in 1858, while piloting the steamboat Pennsylvania, Clemens had a premonition. He saw his younger brother Henry laid out in a metal coffin that rested on two chairs. There was a bouquet of white flowers in the coffin and a single red flower on the young man’s chest. He was surprised that it was a metal coffin, for such were expensive and far more than he knew his family could afford. But so vivid was the dream that when Clemens awoke he was almost certain Henry had died. He later wrote in his autobiography, “I dressed and moved toward that door thinking I would go in there and have a look at it, but I changed my mind. I thought I could not yet bear to meet my mother … (Then) it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream.” Although he told one or two people of the dream, he neglected to mention it to his brother Henry, who later came aboard the Pennsylvania. Then Clemens was transferred to another riverboat while his brother remained on the Pennsylvania. Two days later, the Pennsylvania unexpectedly exploded, killing 150 people. Henry Clemens was badly burned by the exploding boilers of the boat. Clemens rushed to his bedside and was there when his brother died. Waking from a sleep of exhaustion, Clemens found that Henry’s body had been moved. When he found it, it was exactly as he had dreamed, in a metal coffin resting on the two chairs. It transpired that several ladies, who had been admirers of Henry, had taken up a collection and purchased the expensive coffin. As Clemens stood gazing at his brother’s body in the coffin, an elderly lady approached and placed a white bouquet and a single red flower on his chest. The whole experience cemented in Clemens a belief in a sixth sense.

In 1862, Clemens accepted a post as a feature writer for the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise and adopted the pen name of Mark Twain, taken from the “two fathoms deep” soundings on the riverboats. After publication of his first book in 1867 (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches), Clemens/Twain traveled to Europe and the Middle East and then produced his second successful book, Innocents Abroad (1869).

As he became more successful, he met and befriended a wide variety of people. One was Helen Adams Keller who, although blind and deaf, achieved an education and training regarded as the most extraordinary accomplishment ever made in the education of handicapped persons. She entered Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904. She wrote many books and articles. She and Twain became close friends. He was fascinated by her seemingly amazing intuitive abilities to know what other people were thinking and to be aware of her own surroundings. In fact, Twain experienced something of this telepathy on first meeting Keller. He said, “The girl began to deliver happy ejaculations, in her broken speech. Without touching anything, of course, and without hearing anything, she seemed quite well to recognize the character of her surroundings. She said, ‘Oh, the books, so many, many books. How lovely!’ I told her a long story, which she interrupted all along and in the right places, with cackles, chuckles, and carefree bursts of laughter. Then Miss Sullivan (Keller’s teacher) put one of Helen’s hands against her lips and said, ‘What is Mr. Clemens distinguished for?’ Helen answered, in her crippled speech, ‘For his humor.’ I spoke up modestly and said, ‘And for his wisdom.’ Helen said the same words instantly—'and for his wisdom.’ I suppose it was mental telepathy for there was no way for her to know what I had said.” Keller continued to amaze Twain by finishing his sentences for him as they conversed.

When physical medium Daniel Dunglas Home retired from public life, he refused to meet with most people. He did, however, agree to meet with Twain, who had been critical of him. Apparently Twain found Home convincing, and returned for several more private meetings with him. In 1879, Twain attended a series of private séances with the medium in Paris. The two men maintained a strong friendship until Home’s death in 1886. Twain also became close friends with Count Louis Hamon, better known as “Chiero,” the palm reader, numerologist, and astrologer. Cheiro’s reading of Twain’s palm was revealing. Twain wrote, “The past may leave its mark, I admit, and character may even be told even down to its finest shades of expression; all that I might believe—but how the future may be foreshadowed, that I cannot understand … Cheiro has exposed my character with humiliating accuracy. I ought not to confess this accuracy, still I am moved to do it.”

Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research and even contributed some articles to it, his first being a letter on the subject of mental telepathy or, to use his own term, “mental telegraphy.” He wrote two articles for the Journal, “Mental Telegraphy” and “Mental Telegraphy Again.” In these he outlined the latest research together with some of his own firsthand experiences.

Twain’s hand-picked biographer Albert Bigelow Paine said of Twain, “psychic theories and phenomena have always attracted Mark Twain. In thought transference especially he had a frank interest, and an interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomenon [sic], psychic manifestations we call them. In his association with Mrs. Clemens (he had married Olivia Langdon in 1870) it not infrequently happened that one spoke the other’s thoughts or perhaps a longprocrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as it was mailed.” In fact Twain experienced psychic events on such a regular basis that he was able to put his abilities to practical use. On a number of occasions, when he wanted someone to write to him he would himself compose a letter to the person requesting that he or she communicate. Twain would then destroy his letter without sending it. Invariably the next day he would receive the communication he wanted. Astrologer Sybil Leek said that there were numerous occasions when Twain did this and then received letters “that he opened in the presence of other people telling them exactly what was in the letter.” On one occasion this happened when he received a letter from William Wright, a Virginia City, Nevada, journalist. Twain claimed that the (unopened) letter he held up to his friends, which he had just received, would contain comments concerning the possibility of Wright writing a novel about the Nevada silver mines. When the letter was opened it was almost word for word what Twain had written to Wright but had then destroyed and not mailed. Twain later commented, “Mr. Wright’s mind and mine had been in close crystal clear communication with each other over three thousand miles of desert and mountains on this special morning in March.”

Twain imagined that one day there would be a machine—which he dubbed the “phreno-phone"—that would be “a method whereby the communicating of the mind with mind may be brought under command and reduced to certainty and system.” Preston Dennett said, “Mark Twain was … profoundly psychic. Although his effect on the field of psychic research has often been overlooked, his research into the phenomenon of telepathy remains a significant contribution to our understanding of the potentials of the human mind.” Samuel Clemens died April 21, 1910.

Sources:

Twain, Mark

Twain, Mark