Samuel Langhorne Clemens, popularly known as Mark Twain, was born on this day in history, November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. The sixth of seven children, he spent his childhood in Hannibal, a frontier port on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his two most widely read novels.
As a youth, he worked as a typesetter for and contributor of humorous articles to his brother's newspaper before pursuing his dream of navigating the Mississippi on paddle wheel steamboats. He studied 2,000 miles of the river for two years before receiving his steamboat pilot license in 1859. He piloted the boats for three years until the outbreak of the Civil War halted river traffic. He joined a volunteer Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers, but quit after two weeks.
Clemens and his brother traveled by stagecoach across the Plains and Rocky Mountains, visiting Indian tribes and the Mormons in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences inspired Roughing It, published in 1872, and also provided some material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a humorous tall tale published in 1865 that brought him his first national attention as a writer.
Adopted Pen Name, Mark Twain
His journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he tried but failed to become a miner. He found work at a Virginia City newspaper where he first used his pen name, Mark Twain, or “two fathoms deep,” which came from his years working on riverboats, where two fathoms indicated safe water for the passage of a boat.
After traveling to California and Hawaii as a reporter for the Sacramento Union, Twain moved to San Francisco, where he continued to work as a journalist and met other writers, such as Bret Harte. In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean and, while touring Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, later compiled as The Innocents Abroad.
He fell in love at first sight with Olivia Langdon, and they were married in 1870. She came from a wealthy, liberal family, and through her he met abolitionists, socialists, atheists, and activists for women's rights and social equality, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells, who became a longtime friend.
The couple lived in Buffalo, New York, where Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked there as an editor and writer. In 1871, he moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where he built his own unique home, which is now the Mark Twain House and Museum. While living there, Olivia gave birth to three daughters.
In 1873, Twain turned toward social criticism. He and Charles Dudley Warner, the publisher of the Hartford Courant, co-wrote The Gilded Age, a novel that attacked big business, political corruption and the American obsession with making money.
During his 17 years in Hartford, Twain wrote many of his best-known books: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His last work was his autobiography.
Twain Plagued by Financial Problems
Fascinated with science, Twain developed a close, lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and they spent a lot of time together in Tesla's lab. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) features a time traveler from contemporary America using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England.
He made a significant amount of money from his writing, but squandered a lot of it in bad investments, mostly new, scientific inventions. So, he embarked on an around-the-world lecture tour to pay off his creditors. He returned to the United States in 1900, after having earned enough money to pay off all his debts.
Twain also published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet during his time of financial troubles. He infamously assailed James Fenimore Cooper in an article detailing Cooper's Literary Offenses. He also became an outspoken critic of other talented authors, including George Eliot, Jane Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Twain Predicted His Own Death
In his life and writings, Twain was critical of organized religion, praised labor unions, supported women's rights and campaigned for women's suffrage, and favored the abolition of slavery and emancipation of slaves. He also was an ardent critic of American imperialism, writing “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
From 1901 until 1910, Twain was vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. He wrote many political pamphlets for the group, including The Incident in the Philippines, published posthumously in 1924.
In his lifetime, he befriended presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty, and enjoyed great popularity with the reading public, who always appreciated his keen sense of humor. William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature.” Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters in 1907. And Ernest Hemingway called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "the best book we've ever had. There was nothing before. There's been nothing as good since."
In 1909, Twain was quoted as saying: “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”
His prediction came true. On April 21, 1910, Mark Twain died of a heart attack in Redding, Connecticut, a day after the comet's approach to earth. He is buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York.
Sources
- Burns, Ken. Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography. 2001.
- Camfield, Gregg. The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain. 2002.
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