Mark Twain Biography and List of Works

American writer, journalist and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Sensitive to the cadence of language, Twain introduced colloquial speech into American fiction. In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn..."

"When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboat man."
(from 'Old Times on the Mississippi', 1875)

Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, to a Virginian family. He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. After his father's death in 1847, Twain was apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. Later Twain worked as a licensed Mississippi riverboat pilot (1857-61), adopting his name from the call ('Mark twain!' - meaning by the mark of two fathoms) used when sounding river shallows. But this isn't the full story: he also satirized an older writer, Isaiah Sellers, who called himself Mark Twain. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where for two year he edited Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, Clemens signed a humorous travel article using the now famous pseudonym, and 'Mark Twain' was born.

"I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey."

In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a reporter. He visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip and giving lectures. He set out upon a world tour, travelling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners.

Success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. The following year they moved to Hartford. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces, TOM SAWYER (1881), which the author originally intended for adults, and THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER (1881), in which Edward VI of England and a little pauper change places. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (1883) contained an attack on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticism according to Twain caused 'measureless harm' to progressive ideas. From the very beginning of his journalistic career, Twain playfully ridiculed the novel and its tradition. He believed that he lacked the analytical sensibility necessary to the novelist's art, although he enjoyed magnificent popularity as a novelist. He frequently returned to travel writing - many of his finest novels were thinly veiled travelogues.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884) was first considered fiction for adults. Huck Finn, which paints a picture of Mississippi frontier life, was intended as a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Huck, who could not possibly write a story, tells us the story. Both works rank alongside such eminent writers as Stevenson, Dickens, and Saroyan who also honestly depict young people without any condescension or moralizing in their work. Huck's distaste for civilization reflects the ideas of Walden, and his debate over whether or not he will turn in Jim, an escaped slave and a friend, probe the racial tensions of the national conscience. Later Twain wrote in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900): "I have no race prejudices... All that I care to know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."

One of Twain's major achievements is his use of narrative in Huckleberry Finn, which follows the twists and turns of ordinary speech, and his native Missouri dialect. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has noted in Was Huck Black? (1993), that the book draws upon a vernacular formed by black voices as well as white. The model for Huck Finn's voice, according to Fishkin, was a black child instead of a white one. Huck, himself, was drawn from a boy named Tom Blankenship.

'"Who is your folks?" he questions me.
"The Phelpses, down yonder."
"Oh," he says, "how'd you say he got shot?"
"He had a dream," I says, "and it shot him."
"Funny dream," the doctor says.'
(from Huckleberry Finn)

In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in disastrous financial speculation and the collapse of his own publishing firm. To recover from bankruptcy, he embarked upon a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died. Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa, and then returned to the U.S. He wrote such books as THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'HEAD WILSON (1884), a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities, but also an implicit condemnation of a society that allows slavery, PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC (1885), and the travel book FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR (1897).

The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, which is reflected in his writings and his posthumously published autobiography (1924). Twain died on April 21, 1910. He dictated his autobiography during his last years to his secretary A.B. Paine, and various versions of it have been published. In 1916 THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER was published, set in 16th-century Austria, in which Satan reveals the hypocrisies and stupidities of the village of Eselddorf.

"If men neglected 'God's poor' and 'God's stricken and helpless ones' as He does, what would become of them? The answer is to be found in those dark lands where man follows His example and turns his indifference back upon them: they get no help at all; they cry, and plead and pray in vain, they linger and suffer, and miserably die."
(from 'Thoughts of God')

During his long writing career, Twain produced a considerable number of essays, which appeared in various newspapers and magazines, including the Galaxy, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and North American Review. In his "Sandwich Islands" letters (1873) Twain describes how missionaries and the American government corrupted the Hawaiians, "Queen Victoria's Jubilee" (1897) presents the pomp and pageantry of an English royal procession, and "King Leopold's Soliloquy" (1905) reveals in a dramatic monologue the political evils caused by despotism. Twain's finest satire of imperialism was perhaps "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), in which the author wrote that the people in darkness are beginning to see "more light than... was profitable for us."

Biographies and other information: Mark Twain by Albert Bigelow Paine (1912); Mark Twain by Edgar Lee Masters (1938); Mark Twain: Social Critic by Philip Foner (1958); Mark Twain: Social Philosopher by Louis J. Budd (1962); Mark Twain Himself by Milton Meltzer (1960); Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Henry Nash Smith (1963); Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain by Justin Kaplan (1966); Mark Twain by Charles Neider (1967); Mark Twain as Critic by Sydney J. Krause (1967); Plots and Characters in the Works of Mark Twain by Robert L. Gale (1973); The Art of Mark Twain by William H. Gibson (1976); Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer by William R. Macnaughton (1979); Mark Twain by Robert Keith Miller (1983); The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century by Bud Foote (1990) - See also: Peter Salwen's Mark Twain Page; Mark Twain Journal (1986); Mark Twain and Science by Sherwood Cummings (1988) - Notes: Mark Twain's own life inspired the film The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) - Among Mark Twain's most popular short stories is The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, Twain's first tales were born in an era when the American short story was rooted in various folk and humorous traditions. - Philip José Farmer made Mark Twain the central character in his Riverworld epic.

THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY, AND OTHER SKETCHES, (1867)
THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT, ETC., (1882)
A DOG'S TALE, (1904)