Twain, Mark

Twain, Mark, pseud. of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910, American author, b. Florida, Mo. As humorist, narrator, and social observer, Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of humor, characterization, and realism, has been called the first (and sometimes the best) modern American novel.

Early Life and Works

After the death of his father in 1847, young Clemens was apprenticed to a printer in Hannibal, Mo., the Mississippi River town where he spent most of his boyhood. He first began writing for his brother's newspaper there, and later he worked as a printer in several major Eastern cities. In 1857, Clemens went to New Orleans on his way to make his fortune in South America, but instead he became a Mississippi River pilot—hence his pseudonym, "Mark Twain," which was the river call for a depth of water of two fathoms. The Civil War put an end to river traffic, and in 1862 Clemens went west to Carson City, Nev., where he failed in several get-rich-quick schemes. He eventually began writing for the Virginia City Examiner and later was a newspaperman in San Francisco.

Soon the humorist "Mark Twain" emerged, a writer of tall tales and absurd anecdotes. He first won fame with the comic masterpiece "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press and later (1867) used as the title piece for a volume of stories and sketches. When he returned from a trip to Hawaii financed by the Sacramento Union in 1866, Twain became a successful humorous lecturer. The articles he wrote on a journey to the Holy Land were published in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., and settled down in Hartford, Conn., to be "respectable," although Roughing It (1872) presented anecdotes of his less genteel past on the Western frontier.

Mature Works

In Hartford, Twain wrote some of his best work: The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel written with Charles Dudley Warner about materialism and corruption in the 1870s; two evocations of his boyhood in Hannibal, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); The Prince and the Pauper (1882), a novel for children that blends the simplicity of a fairy tale with realistic social criticism; and the nonfictional Life on the Mississippi (1883). He also produced a travel book, A Tramp Abroad (1880), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which satirical overtones reflect a profound seriousness.

Later Life and Works

Some of Twain's later works are forced attempts at humor—The American Claimant (1892) and two sequels to Tom Sawyer. His distinctly bitter Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) underscores his increasingly melancholy attitude. Over the years Twain had invested a great deal of money in unsuccessful printing and publishing ventures, and in 1893 he found himself deeply in debt. To recoup his losses he wearily lectured his way around the world, being funny at whatever cost, and recording his experiences in Following the Equator (1897).

His later life was shadowed by the deaths of two of his daughters and by the long illness and death in 1904 of his wife. Some critics think that the fierce pessimism of his later works derives from these tragedies. Whatever the reason, he abandoned the optimistic tone of The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and wrote such somber works as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), What Is Man? (1905), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and Letters from the Earth (1962). The strange contradiction in personality between the genial humorist and the declared misanthrope has long intrigued commentators and makes Twain a fascinating biographical subject.

Twain's Masterpiece: Huckleberry Finn

Twain's literary reputation rests most particularly on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In its hero, a resourceful, unconventional boy with an innate sense of human values, Twain created one of the most memorable characters in fiction. The narrative device of a raft carrying Huck and a runaway slave down the Mississippi enabled Twain to achieve a realistic portrait of American life in the 19th cent. Through his use of authentic vernacular speech he revolutionized the language of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American writers. In 1990 a handwritten manuscript of the first half of the novel was discovered that includes a number of minor changes and an episode that was left out of the original published version; these passages were included in an edition published in 1996.

Bibliography

See his collected letters, ed. by E. M. Branch et al. (1987); his correspondence with William Dean Howells, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (1967); his notebooks, ed. by F. Anderson et al. (3 vol., 1975–80); his autobiography, ed. by C. Neider (1959); biographies by J. Kaplan (1966, repr. 2003), A. Hoffman (1997), F. Kaplan (2003), and R. Powers (2005); studies by W. D. Howells (1910), B. De Voto (1932), H. N. Smith (1967), V. W. Brooks (rev. ed. 1933, repr. 1970), and W. Gibson (1976); F. Anderson and K. M. Sanderson, ed., Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage (1972).

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Twain, Mark

 orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Mark Twain.

(credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LC-USZ62-112728)

(born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.) U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer. He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River and was apprenticed in 1848 to a local printer. He received a riverboat pilot's license in 1859 and later moved on to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman's term for water 2 fathoms (12 ft [3.7 m]) deep. In a California mining camp he heard the story that he first published in 1865 and made famous as the title story of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, from the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) to Life on the Mississippi (1883), his reflections on being a riverboat captain. He won a worldwide audience for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bankrupted him. His eldest daughter died in 1896, his wife in 1904, and another daughter in 1909. He expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).

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Twain, Mark See Clemens, Samuel Langhorne.

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Twain, Mark 

(pen name; real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Born Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Mo.; died Apr. 21, 1910, in Redding, Conn. American writer.

Twain grew up in the town of Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River. Beginning in 1853 he lived in various places around the country. He worked as a pilot on the Mississippi and prospected for silver in Nevada and for gold in California. Throughout this period, Twain wrote for various newspapers. In 1865 he won renown for a story modeled on backwoods yarns, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

In 1867, Twain traveled to Europe and Palestine; his book based on the trip, The Innocents Abroad (1869), was a huge success that established folk humor as a legitimate literary genre. The Innocents is full of pride in Twain’s native country—a country unmarked by feudal oppression, servility, or landlessness. The book’s humor enhances its passionate affirmation of national culture. In 1872, Twain published an autobiographical work about the Far West, Roughing It (published in Russian translation under the title Nalegke [Traveling Light] in 1959). Here, too, the narrator is an “innocent,” a facetious braggart, and a master of the pointedly harsh simile. Twain’s novel The Gilded Age (1873), written jointly with C. D. Warner, mirrored the age of speculations and swindles that followed the Civil War in the United States—a time of “mad money” and disappointed hopes. Twain’s early writings are at times bitterly satirical; most of his world-renowned stories, however, written in the early 1870’s and first published in collected form in “Old and New Sketches” (1875), are contagiously cheerful. Their boisterous humor conveys the still unexpended vigor of American democracy and the country’s ability to laugh at its own weaknesses. The persona of the “innocent” and the comic device of reduction to the absurd are used to reveal the illogical under the mask of the familiar.

From 1871 to 1891, Twain lived in Hartford, Conn. The “frontier” writer found it hard to breathe in the atmosphere of New England, with its literary and moral taboos. Twain’s increasingly critical attitude toward his bourgeois surroundings is reflected in his Letter From the Recording Angel, written in 1887 and published in 1946.

A series of sketches by Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. This was followed, in 1876, by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, consisted of sketches about the old times as well as about contemporary life. Next came The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in England in 1884 and in the United States in 1885. In all these books, the author communicates a sense of distance between America’s past and its present. Free of former illusions, Twain now recognizes the cruel and savage aspects of American democracy even in times past.

Twain’s books about the American past, marked by critical acuity and a profound immersion in the reality of everyday life, embody conceptions that are still valid today. In the autobiographical Tom Sawyer, the world of childhood defends itself against the proper and the pious. In Life on the Mississippi, piloting is extolled as a science. While Huckleberry Finn begins and ends with boyhood adventures recalling those of Tom Sawyer, the adventures in this case are merely a framework; the main part of the book is a sharply critical representation of the American backwoods and the harshness and venality of daily life. The novel is written from Huck’s point of view, and American life is seen through his eyes. Here, the homeless hero of Twain’s earlier work has acquired a new dimension, combining simpleminded-ness with unusual sensitivity. A similar range of feelings marks the figure of the runaway slave Jim, whose portrayal is completely realistic and poetic at the same time; along with a childishly trusting nature and the ability to interpret signs, Jim is endowed with generosity and delicacy of soul. These two simpleminded outcasts floating down the unspoiled river, past unprepossessing provincial towns, have been found congenial by 20th-century writers. Faulkner counted them among his favorite characters, and Hemingway’s observation is famous: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (Sobr. soch., vol. 2, Moscow, 1968, p. 306). The book’s remarkable qualities, which Hemingway recognized, are the perceptive insights about America’s provincial heartland, the poetic imagery set in contrast to hypocrisy and self-satisfaction, the fluency of composition, and the boldly innovative language with its use of colloquialisms, slang, and Negro dialect.

Throughout Twain’s life, his thoughts turned repeatedly to the Middle Ages. The hierarchical society of the past, which offended his democratic nature, seemed to him grotesque. In 1882 he published The Prince and the Pauper, an allegorical tale that vehemently rejects the world of social barriers and privileges. Another fictional work by Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, published in 1889, is a sharp parody tinged with plebeian militancy.

A difficult time in Twain’s life began in the early 1890’s. The failure of his publishing firm in 1894 forced him to work at a feverish pace and to make a year-long lecture tour around the world in 1895. The death of a daughter dealt him another blow. Bitterness permeates much of Twain’s writing in his last two decades. The traditional beliefs of the American philistine are turned inside out in the frequently misanthropic opinions of the hero of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). Bitter disillusionment with bourgeois democracy compelled the latter-day Twain to expose the illusory nature of standards and ideals inculcated in childhood. In the short novel The Mysterious Stranger, published in 1916, he reexamined the dominant motifs of his life’s work. The freedom of a childhood lived on the riverside, in the spirit of Tom Sawyer, is now placed in a somber medieval context. While Satan’s speeches, mocking human self-delusion, are fed by Twain’s despair, they are also the vehicle for the author’s famous words about the power of laughter—a weapon that nothing can withstand.

The 20th century acknowledges Twain as a classic of world literature and at the same time as a genuinely national writer—one who has revealed the America where the tragic exists side by side with the comic, and horror with poetry. One of the greatest humorists of modern times, Twain is also a beloved children’s writer. Twain won early recognition in Russia: a translation of his story of the jumping frog appeared in 1872 in Birzhevye vedomosti (Exchange Gazette), and The Gilded Age (under the title Mishurnyi vek [Age of Tinsel]) was printed in 1874 in Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). Twain was warmly praised by M. Gorky and A. Kuprin, and his popularity has continued to grow throughout the USSR.

WORKS

Writings, vols. 1–25. New York-London, 1907–18.
Writings, vols. 1–37. New York, 1922–25.
Letters, vols. 1–2. Edited by A. B. Paine. New York-London, 1917.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vols. 1–2. New York-London, 1924.
Mark Twain’s Notebook. New York-London, 1935.
In Russian translation:
Sobr. Soch., vols. 1–12. Moscow, 1959–61. (Introductory essay by M. Mendel’son.)

REFERENCES

Mendel’son, M. Mark Tven. Moscow, 1958.
Startsev, A. Mark Tven i Amerika. [Moscow, 1963.]
Foner, P. Mark Tven—sotsial’nyi kritik. Moscow, 1961. (Translated from English.)
De Voto, B. A. Mark Twain’s America and Mark Twain at Work. Boston, 1967.
Geismar, M. Mark Twain: An American Prophet. Boston, 1970.
Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage. London, 1971.
Levidova, I. Mark Tven: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’. Moscow, 1974.

M. B. LANDOR