Serbian-American inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943, blurred at centre) performs an electrical experiment for writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain (1835 - 1910, left) and actor Joseph Jefferson (1829 - 1905), 1894.
Mark Twain at literary goodbye luncheon to W. D. Howells, Lakewood USA: W D Howells, Mark Twain, George Harvey, H. M. Alden, A. Munro, M. W. Hazeltine.
Mark Twain's seventieth birthday dinner group (5 December, 5 days after the actual birthday): Kate Douglas Riggs, Mark Twain, Rev. Joseph H Twichell, Bliss Carman, Ruth McEnry Stuart, Henry Mils Alden, H H Rogers.
Author Mark Twain poses for a portrait with Anna Laura (Elizabeth) Hawkins Frazer, who was the inspiration for Twain's character Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
(Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years ...)
Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything and usually failed.
(In post-Civil War America, everyone wants to get rich. Si...)
In post-Civil War America, everyone wants to get rich. Si Hawkins, a member of a poor Tennessee family wants to sell some land at the right price. However, the price is never right so Si Hawkins dies. His daughter, Laura leaves her home for Washington D.C. where she tries to learn the politician’s wicked schemes. In a parallel story, two upper class young men dream of speculating land prices and being filthy rich.
(This is a rare non-fiction autobiographical story by Mark...)
This is a rare non-fiction autobiographical story by Mark Twain in which he talks about his early days of riding on a steamboat throughout the Mississippi River. His experiences on this river would later help him write his famous fictional stories involving Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
(The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 nov...)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived.
(While many elements of civilized culture provided much co...)
While many elements of civilized culture provided much comic fodder for Mark Twain, detectives occupied a portion of his observations and writing for a time. The story of the Stolen White Elephant, though entirely preposterous, is rumored to be modeled after real life efforts of an actual police department who misplaced the body of a deceased victim.
(Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River...)
Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, was host to riverboat travelers from around the world, providing a vigorous and variable atmosphere for the young Samuel Clemens to absorb. Clemens became a riverboat pilot and even chose his pen name, Mark Twain, from a term boatmen would call out signifying water depth at two fathoms, meaning safe clearance for travel.
(The novel's preeminence derives from its wonderfully imag...)
The novel's preeminence derives from its wonderfully imaginative re-creation of boyhood adventures along the Mississippi River, its inspired characterization, the author's remarkable ear for dialogue, and the book's understated development of serious underlying themes, natural man versus civilized society, the evils of slavery, the innate value and dignity of human beings, and other topics. Most of all, Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful story, filled with high adventure and unforgettable characters.
(Young Lord Berkeley has discovered that his family's titl...)
Young Lord Berkeley has discovered that his family's title and wealth was fraudulently obtained by previous generations, and announces to his father, Lord Rossmore, that he intends to travel to America, there to return the Earldom of Rossmore to the rightful heir, along with all of its wealth, titles, and privilege, and to begin his life over again, begin it right, begin it on the level of mere manhood, unassisted by factitious aids, and succeed or fail by pure merit or the want of it.
(This collection of captivating tales displays Twain's cha...)
This collection of captivating tales displays Twain's characteristic energy, imagination, and sense of fun, as well as the darkly satirical edge that marks so much of his work.
(First published in 1893, the story focuses on the adventu...)
First published in 1893, the story focuses on the adventure of a young broker in San Francisco, who loses everything and has to restart his life in London.
(A return trip down the Mississippi River to Uncle Silas's...)
A return trip down the Mississippi River to Uncle Silas's farm is just the beginning of a yarn that includes twins, a diamond heist, a confidence man, a murder, and enough twists and turns to satisfy an avid mystery fan. Tom Sawyer attempts to solve a mysterious murder, and along the way, Mark Twain examines the social customs, legal system, and family expectations of the time as only Twain could.
(This is an illustrated copy of Following the Equator. Fol...)
This is an illustrated copy of Following the Equator. Following the Equator is the 1897 travelogue by the famous American author Mark Twain. Twain wrote the book about a tour he took of the British Empire in 1895 in order to pay for a substantial debt he owed on a failed investment of the typesetting machine.
(At a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew o...)
At a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew of Sherlock Holmes, kills his master, a silver-miner, by blowing up his cabin. Since this occurs when Holmes happens to be visiting, he brings his skills to bear upon the case and arrives at logically worked conclusions that are proved to be abysmally wrong by an amateur detective with an extremely keen sense of smell, which he employs in solving the case. This could be seen as yet another piece where Twain tries to prove that life does not quite follow logic.
(Thirty years after his death, Capt. Stormfield is still s...)
Thirty years after his death, Capt. Stormfield is still speeding across the universe, on his way to the next life, though he doesn't know yet where or when his journey will end. It's not a spoiler to tell you that he does get into heaven (it's in the title after all), but you may be surprised at some of the customs, characters, and spectacles he finds there.
(Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical wo...)
Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject.
(Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War ...)
Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town's young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory are double-edged-by praying for victory they are also praying for the destruction of the enemy for the destruction of human life.
(The Huck Finn of foreign correspondents provides a colorf...)
The Huck Finn of foreign correspondents provides a colorful account of old Honolulu, the island nobility, the City of Refuge on the Kona coast, and the active volcano of Kilauea. These selections of Mark Twain's newspaper dispatches are both charming and informative.
(Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumousl...)
Letters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life, he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity.
For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain’s inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years.
(This remarkably inexpensive volume gathers together hundr...)
This remarkably inexpensive volume gathers together hundreds of Twain's most memorable quips and comments on life, love, history, culture, travel, and a diversity of other topics that occupied his thoughts over 50 years of writing and lecturing.
(This volume collects the most important writings by Mark ...)
This volume collects the most important writings by Mark Twain in which he used biblical settings, themes, and figures. Featuring Twain's singular portrayals of God, Adam, Eve, Satan, Methuselah, Shem, St. Peter, and others, the writings stand among Twain's most imaginative expressions of his views on human nature and humankind's relation to the Creator and the universe.
(Who Is Mark Twain? is a collection of twenty-six wickedly...)
Who Is Mark Twain? is a collection of twenty-six wickedly funny, thought-provoking essays by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, none of which have ever been published before, and all of which are completely contemporary, amazingly relevant, and gut-bustlingly hilarious.
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens was an American distinctive humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. He was also a riverboat pilot, entrepreneur, inventor, and irascible moralist.
Background
Ethnicity:
Twain was of Cornish, English, and Scots-Irish descent.
Mark Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the frontier village of Florida, Missouri, United States; the son of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. He spent his boyhood in nearby Hannibal, on the bank of the Mississippi River, observing its busy life, fascinated by its romance, but chilled by the violence and bloodshed it bred.
Education
Twelve years old when his lawyer father died, Twain left school and began working as an apprentice, then a compositor, with local printers, contributing occasional squibs to local newspapers. At 17 his comic sketch "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" was published by a sportsmen's magazine in Boston.
Later Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters.
Career
In 1853 Clemens began wandering as a journeyman printer to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, settling briefly with his brother, Orion, in lowa before setting out at 22 to make his fortune, he hoped, beside the lush banks of the Amazon River in South America. Instead, traveling down the Mississippi River, he became a steamboat river pilot until the Civil War interrupted traffic.
In 1861 Clemens traveled to Nevada, where he speculated carelessly in timber and silver mining. He settled down to newspaper work in Virginia City, until his reckless pen and redheaded temper brought him into conflict with local authorities; it seemed profitable to escape to California. Meanwhile he had adopted the pen name of Mark Twain, a riverman's term for water that was safe for navigation.
In San Francisco Mark Twain came under the influence of Bret Harte. Artemus Ward encouraged Mark Twain to write The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865), which first brought him national attention. Most of his western writing was hastily, often carelessly, done, and he later did little to preserve it.
In 1865 the Sacramento Union commissioned Mark Twain to report on a new excursion service to Hawaii. His accounts as published in the newspaper provided the basis for his first successful lectures and years later were collected in Letters from the Sandwich Islands (1938) and Letters from Honolulu (1939). His travel accounts were so well received that he contracted in 1866 to become a traveling correspondent for the Alta California; he would circle the globe, dispatching letters. The first step was to travel to New York by ship; his accounts were collected in Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown (1940).
In June 1867 Mark Twain left New York and went to Europe and the Holy Land, sending accounts to the California paper and to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. The letters were later revised as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869), and the book immediately made Mark Twain a popular favorite, in demand especially as a lecturer who could keep large audiences in gales of laughter.
After a brief residence in upstate New York as an editor and part owner of the Buffalo Express, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived for 20 years; there prosperity as a writer and lecturer (in England in 1872 and 1873) seemed guaranteed. Roughing It (1872) recounted Mark Twain's travels to Nevada and reprinted some of the Sandwich Island letters. Neither it, A Tramp Abroad (1880), nor Following the Equator (1898) had popular or critical reception equal to that of The Innocents Abroad.
With Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Age (1873), a quizzical satire on financial speculation and political chicanery, which introduced the character of Colonel Beriah Sellers, a backcountry squire plagued by schemes which might, but never did, bring him sudden fortune. By this time Mark Twain was famous. Anything he wrote would sell, but his imagination flagged. He collected miscellaneous writings into Sketches New and Old (1875) and tried to fit Colonel Sellers into a new book, which finally materialized years later as The American Claimant (1891).
Meanwhile Mark Twain's account of steamboating experiences for the Atlantic Monthly (1875; expanded to Life on the Mississippi, 1883) captured the beauty, glamour, and menace of the Mississippi. Boyhood memories of life beside that river were written into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875), which immediately attracted young and old. With more exotic and foreign settings, The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) attracted readers also, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), in which Mark Twain again returned to the river scenes he knew best, was considered vulgar by many contemporaries.
Tom Sawyer, better organized than Huckleberry Finn, is a narrative of innocent boyhood play that inadvertently discovers evil as Tom and Huck witness a murder by Injun Joe in a graveyard at midnight. Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain's finest creation. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a loosely strung series of adventures, can be viewed as the story of a quest for freedom and an escape from what society requires in exchange for success. Whatever its faults, Huckleberry Finn is a classic. Variously interpreted, it is often thought to suggest more than it reveals, speaking of what man has done to confuse himself about his right relation to nature. It can also be thought to treat of man's failures in dealing with his fellows and of the corruption so deeply engrained that man's only escape is in flight, perhaps even from himself. Huck, who shuns civilization, seems a symbol of simple honesty and conscience. His boy's-eye view of a world distorted by pretense and knavery anticipates the use of a young narrator by numerous important American authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and J. D. Salinger. Yet Tom, not Huck, seems to have remained Mark Twain's favorite, giving title to Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), and to unpublished tales later collected in Hannibal, Huck, and Tom (1969).
Mark Twain's early books were sold by subscription; they sold well, for Twain prided himself on gauging public taste. Many were not issued until subscription agents had secured enough advance orders to make them surely profitable. As a traveling lecturer, he helped sell his books, and his books helped pack his lectures. He was probably the best-known and certainly among the most prosperous writers of his generation. Unsatisfied, he reached for more. When his work The Prince and the Pauper did not sell as he thought it should, he established his own publishing firm, which did well for a while. But Mark Twain was soon in serious trouble. For several years he had been supplying large sums toward the perfecting of a typesetting machine, convinced that it would make his fortune. But in 1891 he retreated with his family to Europe, where they could live more cheaply. In 1894 the publishing company went bankrupt, and the typesetter failed in competition with less complex rivals. Mark Twain was deeply in debt.
Meanwhile, in 1893, Henry Huttleston Rogers, a director of the Standard Oil Company, had assumed control of Mark Twain's financial affairs. While Mark Twain lectured around the world to pay his debts, Rogers placated creditors, invested his royalties, and arranged new publishing contracts. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is sometimes remembered as Mark Twain's second-best book, but it brought little immediate financial assistance. Mark Twain and his family remained in Europe, saddened by the death of one daughter and seeking help for the apparently incurable illness of another. Rogers finally steered him out of debt and arranged a publishing contract which ensured Mark Twain and his heirs a handsome income.
On his return to the United States in 1900, Mark Twain rose to new heights of popularity. His publicized insistence on paying every creditor had made him something of a public hero. He was widely sought as a speaker, and he seemed proud to be the genial companion of people like the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegie, though in private he opposed the principles for which they seemed to stand. His writings grew increasingly bitter. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) exposed corruption in a small, typical American town. King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905) attacked hypocrisy in treatment of inhabitants of the Congo, fulminating against what Mark Twain called "the damn'd human race." What Is Man? (1906) was a diatribe of despair. Extracts from Adam's Diary (1904) had humorously presented man as a blunderer; Eve's Diary (1906), written partly in memory of his wife, showed man saved from bungling only through the influence of a good woman. Many of his later indictments of human cupidity were, he thought, so severe that they could not be published for 100 years. But when some appeared in Letters from the Earth (1962), they seemed hardly more bitter than what had appeared before.
In 1906 Mark Twain began to dictate his autobiography to Albert B. Paine (his literary executor), recording scattered memories without chronological arrangement. Portions from it were published in periodicals later that year. Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909), a burlesque Mark Twain had puttered over for years, partly disguised his pessimism with a veneer of rollicking humor as it detailed the low esteem in which man is held by celestial creatures. With the income from the excerpts of his autobiography, he built a large house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Stormfield. There, after several trips to Bermuda to bolster his waning health, he died on April 21, 1910.
Twain was a Presbyterian. He was critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. He 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". With anti-Catholic sentiment rampant in 19th century America, Twain noted he was "educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic". As an adult, he engaged in religious discussions and attended services, his theology developing as he wrestled with the deaths of loved ones and with his own mortality.
Politics
Before 1899, Twain was an ardent imperialist. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands. He said the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought. In 1899, however, he reversed course. In the New York Herald, October 16, 1900, Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine–American War, to anti-imperialism.
Views
Twain was opposed to the vivisection practices of his day. His objection was not on a scientific basis but rather an ethical one. He specifically cited the pain caused to the animal as his basis of his opposition.
Quotations:
"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."
"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
Membership
Twain was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Personality
Mark Twain was an excellent observationalist. He commented on the way that humans interact, the way we process our emotions, and what it means to be a person. His literature manifests his personality's candor, graphicness, humor, and criticalness. He loved to smoke, drink, and tell stories. As Mark said, ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckleheadedness, and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what he was at 19 and 20.
Quotes from others about the person
"An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain." - Thomas Alva Edison
"To my mind, Mark Twain was beyond question the largest man of his time, both in the direct outcome of his work and more important still, if possible, in his indirect influence as a protesting force in an age of iron philistinism." - Rudyard Kipling
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There is nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway
"He was never attracted to subjects which demanded a knowledge of deeper mathematics, for his natural inclination was always stronger toward more poetic and mystic subjects, although I remember his saying that mathematics did not lack poetry either." - daughter, Clara Clemens
"He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time." - Maxim Gorky
"Son of the devil, Mark Twain." - San Francisco Clergyman
"Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking." - George Bernard Shaw
"The true father of our national literature." - H. L. Mencken
"Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, I knew them all and the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature." - William Dean Howells
"Twain was so good with crowds that he became one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual that I can think of only two similar cases, Homer's, perhaps, and Moliere's." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star." - Albert Bigelow Paine
"He is a wellspring of truth, but you can't bring up the whole well with one bucket. I take his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him thirty percent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere." - mother, Jane Clemens
"A contrary cuss and difficult to keep out of deadly indiscretions." - daughter, Jean Clemens
"Of course his swearing never seemed really bad to me. It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow. Sort of amusing it was and gay not like real swearing, 'cause he swore like an angel." - housekeeper, Katy Leary
"He talked delightfully, audaciously, brilliantly his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity. He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself." - Helen Keller
"Hours and hours and hours he sits writing with a wonderful light in his eyes. The flush of a girl in his cheeks, and oh the luster of his hair. It is too terribly perishably beautiful." - personal secretary, Isabel Lyon
"He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose and even the aquiline eye, an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me, of an unusual and dominant nature." - Bret Harte
"That a man coming from humble and unliterary surroundings could have risen even by the most gradual stages to his preeminence as a world figure has no parallel in literary history." - Robert Underwood
Johnson
"Mark Twain’s laugh is the gruff haw-haw of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deckhands on the river steamer and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters." - Willa Cather
"Mark Twain really did stride through the 19th century and manage to be at almost every single moment and every single place when America changed when it moved forward." - Ron Powers
Connections
In 1870 Twain married Olivia Langdon. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened. His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels. His wife died in 1905.
Father:
John Marshall Clemens
Mother:
Jane Lampton Clemens
Spouse:
Olivia Langdon
Brother:
Orion Clemens
Daughter:
Olivia Susan "Susy" Clemens
Daughter:
Clara Clemens
Daughter:
Jean Clemens
Friend:
Dan DeQuille
Friend:
Henry Huttleston Rogers
References
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography
With brilliant immediacy, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brings to life a towering literary figure whose dual persona symbolized the emerging American conflict between down-to-earth morality and freewheeling ambition
1966
How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s lifetime spans America’s era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term Gilded Age failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.
Mark Twain
This book pulls together material from a variety of published and unpublished sources. It examines not merely his justly famous novels, stories, travelogues, and lectures, but also his diaries, letters, and 275 illustrations and photographs from throughout his life.