Mark Twain

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." The Almighty, he reasoned, would not let two unaccountable freaks arrive together and leave apart. He was right. He died of a heart attack on the 21st of April 1910, one day after the comet passed closest to the Sun. But the man born Samuel Langhorne Clemens spent the seventy-four years between those two visits doing far more than predicting his own exit. He learned a river by heart in the dark. He failed at silver mining and stumbled into fame with a story about a frog. He earned fortunes and lost them on a machine that never quite worked. And somewhere along the way, a humorist who once advocated genocide against Native Americans became the country's loudest voice against empire. How does a printer's apprentice from Hannibal, Missouri become the man William Faulkner called the father of American literature? And how does a writer of comic sketches end up writing about the slaughter of helpless people in the Philippines?

• 2. The River In The Dark

  ›

  "There was but one permanent ambition" among the boys of Hannibal, Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi: to be a steamboatman. The pilot held the grandest position of all, earning a princely salary of a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, with no board to pay. A pilot's prestige, Twain claimed, exceeded even the captain's. The price of that prestige was memorizing twelve hundred miles of water. Steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby took young Clemens on as a cub pilot for five hundred dollars, payable out of his first wages. The river was no fixed thing. It hid reefs, submerged snags, and rocks that would "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated." A pilot had to know where each one sat even in total darkness. It took more than two years before Clemens earned his pilot's license. The river also gave him his name. "Mark twain" was the leadsman's cry for a depth of two fathoms, twelve feet, the mark of water safe for a steamboat to pass. On the steamer A. B. Chambers, the young pilot served alongside Grant Marsh, later famous on the Missouri River. The two admired each other and wrote letters for years after Clemens left the water. One arrangement haunted him. He convinced his younger brother Henry to join him, securing Henry a post as mud clerk on the steamboat Pennsylvania. On the 13th of June 1858, the boat's boiler exploded, and Henry died of his wounds eight days later. Twain claimed he had foreseen the death in a dream a month earlier. He held himself responsible for the rest of his life, and he became an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.

• 3. Westward And The Frog

  ›

  When the Civil War curtailed Mississippi traffic in 1861, Clemens enlisted briefly in a Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers, serving two weeks as a Second Lieutenant before it disbanded. He later turned the episode into the sketch "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed." His real escape route ran west. His brother Orion had become secretary to the Nevada Territory governor James W. Nye, and Clemens went along. The brothers spent more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, stopping at the Mormon community in Salt Lake City, where members gave him a Book of Mormon. The journey ended at the silver-mining town of Virginia City, where he tried his hand on the Comstock Lode and failed. Journalism caught him when mining did not. He went to work at the Territorial Enterprise under his friend Dan DeQuille. On the 3rd of February 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "Mark Twain" for the first time. His break came from a tale he had heard in a hotel at Angels Camp, in Calaveras County, California. "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published on the 18th of November 1865 in the New York weekly The Saturday Press, and it brought him national attention. A year later, the Sacramento Union sent him to the Sandwich Islands, the present-day Hawaii, as a reporter. His letters home proved popular and became the basis for his first lectures. In 1867, two newspapers funded his trip aboard the Quaker City to Europe and the Middle East. Those travel letters became The Innocents Abroad in 1869. On that voyage he met a fellow passenger named Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia.

• 4. Olivia And Hartford

  ›

  Olivia Langdon rejected Twain's first marriage proposal, but he kept courting her and won over her reluctant father. They married in Elmira, New York, in February 1870, and the marriage lasted thirty-four years until her death in 1904. Her family was wealthy but liberal, and through her Twain met abolitionists, atheists, and activists for women's rights, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and the writer William Dean Howells, who became a long-time friend. The early years held grief. The Clemenses lived in Buffalo from 1869 to 1871, where Twain held a stake in the Buffalo Express, and there their son Langdon died of diphtheria in 1872 at nineteen months. They went on to have three daughters: Susy, born in 1872, Clara, born in 1874, and Jean, born in 1880. Starting in 1873, the family settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in a house Twain arranged to build next door to Stowe. Summers were spent at Quarry Farm in Elmira, the home of Olivia's sister Susan Crane. In 1874, Susan built him an octagonal gazebo as a surprise, a quiet place set apart from the main house where he could write and enjoy his cigars. Across seventeen years in Hartford and more than twenty summers at Quarry Farm, Twain wrote the books that made his name: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, The Prince and the Pauper in 1881, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889. Tom Sawyer drew on his boyhood, modeled on himself with traces of schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen, while Huckleberry Finn was based on his boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

• 5. The Machine That Ruined Him

  ›

  Twain spent three hundred thousand dollars between 1880 and 1894 on the Paige typesetting machine, a mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked and broke down when it did not. Before it could be perfected, a rival invention called the Linotype made it obsolete. The loss swallowed the bulk of his book profits and a large part of Olivia's inheritance. His publishing house failed him too. Charles L. Webster and Company, run with his nephew by marriage, found early success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, then collapsed after a biography of Pope Leo XIII sold fewer than two hundred copies. Facing dwindling income, the family closed the expensive Hartford home and moved to Europe in June 1891. Rescue came through Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal of Standard Oil whom Twain met in 1893. Rogers had Twain file for bankruptcy protection in April 1894, then transferred the copyrights to Olivia to keep them from creditors. Rogers managed his money until every creditor was paid. Twain himself went on the road to do the paying. In July 1895 he began a year-long around-the-world lecture tour to settle his debts in full, though bankruptcy meant he was no longer legally bound to do so. The trip was long and arduous, and he was sick much of the time. He crossed northern America to British Columbia, then sailed the Pacific, with a scheduled Honolulu lecture canceled by a cholera epidemic. He went on to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, and South Africa. His three months in India became the centerpiece of his seven-hundred-and-twelve-page book Following the Equator. He returned to America in October 1900, having earned enough to clear his debts.

• 6. From Eagle To Anti-Imperialist

  ›

  "I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific," Twain admitted in the New York Herald on the 16th of October 1900. He had once been an imperialist. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he spoke strongly for American interests in the Hawaiian Islands, and he called the war with Spain in 1898 "the worthiest" war ever fought. Then he read the treaty of Paris. He saw that the United States meant not to free the Philippines but to subjugate them. "We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem," he wrote, and declared himself an anti-imperialist opposed to the eagle putting its talons on any other land. From 1901 until his death in 1910, Twain served as vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines and counted tens of thousands of members. He wrote many pamphlets for the cause. The Incident in the Philippines, published in 1924, answered the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. "In what way was it a battle?" Twain asked. "We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people." His scorn reached across oceans. He attacked European imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II of Belgium. In 1905 he published King Leopold's Soliloquy, a satire of the monarch's private colony, the Congo Free State, in which the King argues that bringing Christianity outweighs "a little starvation." During the Philippine-American War he wrote a pacifist story called The War Prayer. Harper's Bazaar rejected it on the 22nd of March 1905 as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Twain told his friend Daniel Carter Beard, "None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Bound by an exclusive contract with Harper and Brothers, he could not publish it elsewhere, and it stayed unprinted until 1916.

• 7. The Contradictions

  ›

  "The scum of the earth!" Twain wrote of Native Americans in "The Noble Red Man" in 1870, calling the Indian's heart a cesspool of falsehood and treachery, and in the same tract advocating extermination. The man who would later denounce the white man's "notion that he is less savage than the other savages" had once urged genocide. His views did not sit still. In a letter to William Dean Howells in 1887, Twain traced his own drift. When he finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 he was a Girondin; reading it again over the years, he became a Sansculotte, and not a pale one but "a Marat." On race he could be far ahead of his age. He called Lincoln's Proclamation a thing that set the white man free as well as the black slaves. He paid for at least one Black person to attend Yale Law School and another to study for the ministry. He backed women's suffrage with his "Votes for Women" speech in 1901, befriended Helen Keller for roughly sixteen years, and won a Connecticut pension for Prudence Crandall, who had educated young African-American women. On politics he leaned conservative, believing in laissez faire and ranking property rights above personal political rights, yet he wrote glowingly of unions and praised the Knights of Labor. A Republican for most of his life, he broke with his party in 1884 to join the Mugwumps and back Grover Cleveland, judging the Republican nominee James G. Blaine corrupt. He was a Presbyterian and a Freemason, raised to Master Mason in 1861, and yet he wrote that "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

• 8. Last Years And The Comet's Return

  ›

  Twain spent his later years at 14 West 10th Street in Manhattan, sinking into a depression that began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia died in 1904, his daughter Jean on the 24th of December 1909, and his close friend Henry Rogers suddenly on the 20th of May 1909. Grief gathered around him as the comet drew near. He found odd comfort in young company. In 1906 he formed the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club for girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, a dozen or so members between the ages of ten and sixteen, and he called the club his "life's chief delight." The honors arrived in these years too. Yale gave him a Doctor of Letters in 1901, the University of Missouri a Doctor of Law in 1902, and Oxford a Doctorate of Law in 1907. In 1909, Thomas Edison visited him at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut, and filmed him, leaving the only known film footage of Twain. President William Howard Taft said Twain "gave pleasure, real intellectual enjoyment, to millions," and made an enduring part of American literature. He was buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. The Langdon plot is marked by a monument twelve feet tall, two fathoms, the depth of "mark twain," placed there by his surviving daughter Clara. One hundred years after his death, in November 2010, the University of California published the first volume of his autobiography, over seven hundred and thirty-six pages, exactly as he had wished. It became an unexpected best-seller, making him one of very few authors with new best-selling volumes in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.