Instead of cupboards and skeletons, the unexpurgated autobiography offers the "storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head"; not the "facts and happenings" of Twain's life, but his voice. Fortunately for us, perhaps more than any other writer Twain was his voice; the result, for all its frustrations, is a revelation.
After apprenticing as a printer, he worked briefly as a journalist before training as a steamboat pilot, a career interrupted by the outbreak of war in He served fleetingly as a Confederate soldier before deserting "his career as a soldier was brief and inglorious," said the New York Times obituary; in the autobiography Twain includes a sympathetic account of deserting soldiers being shot, without revealing the reason for his sense of identification.
As would Huck Finn, the young Clemens "lit out for the territory" of the west, where Confederate forces were unlikely to pursue him, and sought his fortune in silver-mining.
When that failed he returned to reporting, and adopted his pseudonym, a name derived from the call for safe water from riverboat pilots. His journalism began to establish his reputation; he started lecturing and published his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in Two years later, The Innocents Abroad , the story of Twain's trip with a group of other Americans through Europe and the Holy Land its subtitle was The New Pilgrims' Progress was a bestseller, selling , copies within two years.
He followed it in with Roughing It , another successful travelogue, and for the next 20 years, Twain produced instant classics, including not only The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , but perennial favorites such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Prince and the Pauper , works of social criticism such as The Gilded Age and Following the Equator an early indictment of imperialist racism that deserves rediscovery , Life on the Mississippi , blending autobiography and social history, and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson , a novel using the device of babies switched at birth to expose the malignant senselessness of American racism.
Across their disparate subjects and audiences, what unites Twain's works is his quintessential Americanness. In Twain's obituary, the San Francisco Examiner wrote that he was "curiously and intimately American. He was our very own". Twain went further. Living in Europe in the s, he wrote in his notebook: "Are you an American?
No, I am not an American. I am the American. It isn't just that Twain's books remain as popular as they are critically esteemed, or that his themes — the individual and society, free-market capitalism and social justice, populism and snobbery, deception and honour, idealism and cynicism, freedom and slavery, wilderness and civilisation — represent such characteristically American preoccupations.
Twain was just as American in life, in his self-promotion, commercial ambition, pursuit of celebrity and narcissism. As a child, Twain's daughter Susy began a biography of her famous father, in which she reports his explanation for never attending church: "He couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but [.
Hemingway pronounced in the s that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn "; but Twain didn't invent only modern American literature, he invented modern American authorship, as well.
And now it turns out he also felt he'd reinvented modern autobiography — a favourite American genre, given its emphasis on hubristic individualism and self-invention — calling his new method, with characteristic modesty: "One of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages. I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography. More than businessman, inventor, showman or even writer, at heart Mark Twain was a speculator.
His instinctive grasp of branding and publicity was far ahead of his time, as he flung himself enthusiastically into 19th-century new media. Today he'd be blogging and tweeting his heart out — as long as he could monetise it. He sat for hundreds of daguerrotypes and photographs, displaying what he himself called a "talent for posturing" that suited the burgeoning cult of celebrity.
Even his iconic white suit developed from commercial objectives: he first wore it to appear before Congress, arguing that copyright, which he viewed as a patent, should be extended in perpetuity. It is no accident that so many of Twain's characters are hucksters and hustlers, or that deception and opportunism are abiding themes in his writing. He was susceptible to get-rich-quick schemes: the ventures he invested in and promoted — even as he was writing his greatest books — included vineyards, a steam generator, a steam pulley, a watch company, an insurance company, marine telegraphy, a food supplement called Plasmon, a chalk engraving process called Kaolatype, self-adjusting suspenders and the Paige typesetting machine, which bankrupted him at the height of his fame and forced him back on to the lecture circuit to pay his debts, in part, it's been suggested, to protect the value of his "honourable" brand.
Louis, New York City, and Philadelphia. Then he returned to the Midwest in , working in St. Louis again, Keokuk, and Cincinnati. In , at the age of twenty-two, Sam Clemens boarded a steamboat and headed to New Orleans. He planned to take a trip to South America. Instead, he met the steamboat pilot Horace Bixby, who agreed to let Clemens train with him as a riverboat pilot for a fee of five hundred dollars.
For the next two years, Clemens learned how to pilot a riverboat on the Mississippi River. He gained his piloting license in April and made a good living until the outbreak of the Civil War in April when all commercial traffic on the river stopped.
Clemens then joined the Marion Rangers, a group of Confederate volunteers that disbanded after only two weeks. Sam joined his brother, and together they headed west by stagecoach. When they arrived in Nevada, Clemens worked for Orion for a while, but thought he could make a fortune mining for silver or gold.
Though he tried to strike it rich, Clemens failed and returned to journalism, this time as a reporter. In Clemens moved to San Francisco and worked for various newspapers.
He gave his first public lecture in October and embarked on a lecture tour in the western states to make money and promote his career. Clemens had a natural talent for telling stories and making speeches.
He would lecture on and off for the rest of his life. In , Clemens set sail as a traveling correspondent on a grand tour of Europe and the Mideast for the San Francisco Alto California. His reports of this journey later became his first best-selling book, Innocents Abroad , published in They married in and soon settled in Hartford, Connecticut.
Together they had four children: a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters—Susy, Clara, and Jean. It was at their house in Hartford that Clemens turned from journalism to writing the books and novels that made him famous. In he published Roughing It , an autobiographical account of his years in the West. Clemens set both of these novels in his native Missouri and drew heavily on his boyhood memories of growing up in Hannibal. He examined American culture on the edge of the frontier and dealt seriously with such issues as slavery, poverty, and class differences.
Within the Sampson Collection were a number of rare editions and foreign translations of Mark Twain novels. In , Clemens visited the University of Missouri, Columbia, and donated a twenty-two-volume edition of his collected works to the Society.
During the next two decades, the collection continued to grow slowly through purchases and gifts. Then, in , the Society purchased the fine Mark Twain library of books, over 1, cartoons, and clippings collected by Purd B.
Wright of Kansas City. In , after the death of George A. The Society continued to add to the collection through gifts and purchases, and by the collection had grown to volumes and also contained scrapbooks and additional cartoons.
Any aspect of Missouri history will be considered for publication in the Review. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Useful tips. His answer: the great American West. In July , Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.
At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco.
But nothing panned out, and by the middle of , he was flat broke and in need of a regular job. Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.
Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious. He got a big break in , when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country the story later appeared under various titles. His next step up the ladder of success came in , when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.
At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America. However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain.
Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization. In February , he improved his social status by marrying year-old Olivia Livy Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life.
Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children. Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in , and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace.
Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.
Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside.
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