Florida,
Monroe County, Missouri, November 30, 1835, and is now living in Hartford
City, Connecticut. His works have been immensely popular, and have brought
him an ample fortune, thus enabling him to devote his entire time to literature.
He attended a common school until he was thirteen, when he entered the
printing office of the "Courier" at Hannibal, Missouri, as an apprentice.
Subsequently he pursued his trade in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia
and New York. "In 1855 he went to New Orleans intending to take passage
for Para, to explore the Amazon, and to engage in the cacao trade; but
the fact that there was no ship from New Orleans to Para prevented the
fulfillment of his plans. On his way down the Mississippi, he had made
friends with the pilots, and for the consideration of $500 they engaged
to make him a St. Louis and New Orleans pilot. He went up and down the
river steering and studying the 1,275 miles of the route, and after a time
received his license, and secured a situation as a pilot at $250 per month."
The incidents of his career as a pilot form some of his happiest sketches.
In
1861 his brother received the appointment as secretary of the Territory
of Nevada, and Samuel accompanied him as his private secretary. He worked
in the mines for about a year, and says in his "Roughing It" that he was
really worth a million dollars for just ten days, and lost it through his
own heedlessness. He then shoveled quartz in a silver mill for ten dollars
a week for one week only. All of these experiences are turned to account
most admirably in his writings; and they formed an excellent schooling
for him. He commenced his literary labor by means of occasional letters
to the Virginia City "Enterprise." In 1862 he became editor of "The Enterprise,"
a position he held for three years. Part of the time he reported legislative
proceedings from Carson, summing up results in weekly letters to "The Enterprise,"
which he signed "Mark Twain." The name calls to mind his steamboat days
on the Mississippi, where it indicated a depth of two fathoms of water.
Mark Twain is now a name better known in literature than in steamboat vernacular.
He next went to San Francisco, and for five months reported for the "Morning
Call" newspaper. In pursuit of wealth, he next went to Calaveras County,
where he dug for gold for about three months without result. Returning
to San Francisco, he followed the newspaper business for a short time.
In 1866 he spent about six months on the Hawaiian Islands. Returning again
to California, with considerable reputation he entered the lecture field,
and was more than successful. His peculiar vein of humor tickled the public
ear, hence he decided to give his thoughts to the world in book form. In
1867 he went East and brought out his first book in New York. "The Jumping
Frog and Other Sketches" was at once popular, and was immediately republished
in England.
Finding
that his style pleased the public exceedingly, he entered upon his career
as author with systematic earnestness. In 1867 he crossed the Atlantic
in the steamer Quaker City, and traveled through Spain, Italy, Greece,
Egypt and the Holy Land. The account of his travels appeared in 1869, in
that marvel of wit and humor, "The Innocents Abroad." Within three years,
the work reached the enormous sale of 125,000 copies. Mark Twain edited
a daily paper at Buffalo, for a short time, but soon entered the lecture
field again and revisited England in 1872. In the same year, he published
"Roughing It," which reached a sale of 91,000 in nine months. At this time,
London publishers gathered all his sketches, many of which were never published
in America, and many of which were not written by Mark Twain, and issued
them in four volumes. From the pen of this American genius and humorist
have proceeded the "New Pilgrim's Progress," "Tramp Abroad," "Burlesque
Autobiography," "Eye-openers," "Good Things," "Sereanners," "A Gathering
of Scraps," "The Gilded Age," "Tom Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi,"
and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." His works are published in the Old
World at London and Leipsic, and are very popular on both sides of the
Atlantic. His language is pure and elevated, except when it is necessary
to use the language of classes to represent certain characters. The world
is bound to laugh as long as his works are kept in print.Mark Twain was
born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri;
his family moved to the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father,
an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon afterward the
boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing
newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant
printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857
to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to
licensed pilot.
After
river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with
his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory.
Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous
pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using
the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to
San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor
to the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to
Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the
first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as
humorist and lecturer. After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled
first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartfort, Connecticut.
His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed
by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were
enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised
business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed
attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more
into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained
spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that
was to persist throughout his life.
Following
The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner,
Twain began a literary exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi,
resulting in a trio of masterpieces--The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Another
vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the Pauper
(1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889),
and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), while he continued to
draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the
Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean
Howells, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying
Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published
by Twain's publishing company in 1885. For most of the 1890s Twain lived
in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter
Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of
Twain's writing also turned progressively more bitter. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead
Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery,
was followed by powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such
as 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War Prayer' (1905),
and 'King Leopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches
collected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished
novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most uncompromisingly dark
of all Twain's later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally
resolved, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion,
Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.
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