About the Author

Born in the small hamlet of Florida, Missouri, Mark Twain would become world famous and easily the most celebrated American writer of his period, deemed by William Dean Howells, literary critic and Twain's lifelong friend, as the "Lincoln of our literature." Best known today for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its controversial sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain introduced the American idiom into his lectures, short stories, sketches, and novels.

His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the son of Judge John and Jane Lampton Clemens. Over his career, he offered various stories accounting for the origin of his famous pseudonym, "Mark Twain." Whatever the source, his sobriquet became synonymous with the caricature Clemens carefully orchestrated—a western clown. "God's fool," he once commissioned himself.

Mark Twain's literary career began very early. As a teenager, he wrote amateurish sketches under the unlikely pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass," which appeared in his older brother Orion's newspaper in Muscatine, Iowa. The spirit of these humorous sketches flourished later in his comic editorials published in Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise. First, in newspaper articles in Sacramento and San Francisco, Mark Twain honed his powers of description, relating his adventures in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. These articles, widely reprinted throughout California, led him to the speaker circuit, and he delivered his "Sandwich Island" lecture up and down the Pacific coast. It was "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog"—which he later dismissed as "that villainous backwoods sketch"—published in New York's Saturday Press, however, that brought him national attention and a ticket to the East coast.

The "frog story" became Mark Twain's calling card to the literary "Brahman caste" in the East, including such aging luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the "fireside poets"—John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, each of whom became the target of an unfortunate burlesque at the Whittier birthday celebration for which William Dean Howells had asked Mark Twain to toast the septuagenarian poet. Following Howell's warm and admiring introduction to the western interloper, Mark Twain stood before the pristine assembly and ripped off a risqué sketch, featuring the literati's claimants jousting around a poker table in a tavern out west, each in a drunken stupor. Few people in the room smiled, and no one laughed. For months afterwards, Mark Twain was deeply embarrassed by the occasion when his tasteless little piece of "humor" backfired before the humorless audience. This episode, more than any other, helped to fix the image of "Mark Twain," Clemens' recreant alter ego, as an outlaw, and a rascal. Privately, however, Clemens delighted in the image and courted it throughout his career.

Mark Twain's happiest period was his time spent with his family between New York and New England. In 1869, he first met Olivia "Livy" Langdon, daughter of a wealthy coal magnate from Buffalo, New York, through her photograph in a brother's locket. A year later they were married and began their family, first a boy, Langdon, followed by three girls, Susy, Clara, and Jean. Following the death of their little son, only two, they moved from Buffalo to Hartford, Connecticut, so that Mark Twain could work more closely with his publisher. There in 1874 they moved into their "Hartford House," in the cozy, elite square block the community called "Nook Farm." Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was a neighbor. The three-story subdued red brick house, complete with its detached servants' quarters, was the most extravagant domicile of any living American writer of Twain's day.

Although he would continue writing his comic sketches, Mark Twain was never far from a critical view of any subject he addressed. In time, he became the poignant critic of his age, lambasting a catalog of social ills and what he saw to be frivolous and misguided values that often masked inhumanity. In Innocents Abroad (1869) he spoofs the foibles of wealthy Americans touring Europe and the Middle East. In The Gilded Age (1873) Mark Twain openly attacks graft and corruption in business as well as state and federal politics. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) he not only lampoons knight-errantry and the whole medieval chivalric code, but he also raises the specter of the horrors attending the abuse of nineteenth-century technology.

Perhaps his most significant book-length piece of social criticism is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885). Periodically attacked as a "racist" book, Huckleberry Finn's story of his excursion down the Mississippi River on a raft, with Jim, Miss Watson's runaway slave, is not so much "a racist book" as much as it is "a book about racism," and one of the American nineteenth-century's most vigorous attacks on that social blight. Controversy has always surrounded the work, dating to its condemnation by the Board of the Concord Public Library, members of which characterized the book as the "veriest of trash." On the opposite side of the issue, Ernest Hemingway once noted that "all modern American literature begins with one book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain," and he meant that as a compliment.

As the cornerstone, perhaps, of "all modern American literature," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn follows the tradition of such late nineteenth-century writers of social realism as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Henry James, and others. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain captures not only the idiom of a regional American speech, but he also borrows richly from its colorful folk tradition not to mention features from its more notorious side—its bigotries and small-mindedness, its anti-intellectualism, classism, and its racism. However, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is much more positive than some of Mark Twain's late writings. It is a book with hope, at least for a better America and a better humanity. Huckleberry Finn grows morally because of his association with Jim, and in "Chapter, The Last," Huck rejects all the "flapdoodle" and hypocrisy of St. Petersburg (Hannibal) that he has left behind. His experiences in the novel leave Huck with moral choices, and ultimately, he chooses well.

In addition to his fiction, Mark Twain also explored biography, writing profiles of Joan of Arc and Pope Leo XIII. On the anticipated prospects from sales of the Pontiff's biography, he was mistaken, of course, when he speculated that every Catholic in Christendom would feel obligated to order a copy of their spiritual leader; he failed to realize that most of the world's several million Catholics in his day couldn't read. However, it was the memoirs of the American Civil War general and President Ulysses S. Grant that established him comfortably financially, and he was proud to present the President's widow with the largest single royalty check at that time ever recorded.

As much as he would criticize his world, Mark Twain was very much a part of the American nineteenth century. In fact, he epitomized it in many ways. He chased the American dream and the fortune he hoped to make from it across the continent and eventually around the world. As a journalist, he followed the miners into the western territories, settling in Carson City and Virginia City, Nevada, moving on to the silver mines in Esmeralda, California, and then to San Francisco. Failing to make it rich in gold and silver, he tried publishing and investments in various contraptions and schemes to get rich quick. He sank thousands of dollars into James Paige's typesetter, which Mark Twain was convinced would revolutionize printing, but it, like his dry milk investment, turned sour. After the collapse of his publishing company and at the point of bankruptcy—a public disgrace in the late nineteenth century—Mark Twain turned to lecturing, always his "old reliable," and following an exhausting world-wide tour, paid back each of his creditors to the penny. If not wealthy, the venture made him even more renowned, and he was feted upon his return as "the most conspicuous person on the planet."

At the zenith of his career, Mark Twain was the most celebrated figure in America. Wining and dining with the wealthiest men in the world—men like J. P. Morgan, the Vanderbilts, Henry Huttleston Rogers of Stanford Oil Company, and Andrew Carnegie--Mark Twain strutted from one social occasion to the next in his red socks and creamy white suits, a different, fresh ensemble for every day. Concert halls left a prominent seat vacant on the chance that he might pay a visit. As America's "First Man of Letters," he received honorary doctorate degrees from both the University of Missouri and Oxford University in London. All the glitter, however, masked a dark side.

A misanthrope at the core, Mark Twain devoted much of his later years to drafting brooding philosophical pieces, attacking popular Christianity, especially. The deaths of family members throughout his own lifetime, and particularly the loss of his oldest daughter Susy to spinal meningitis while away from her on his world lecture tour, embittered him deeply. Like so many other writers of his period, enamored with the processes and the promises of the natural sciences, Mark Twain rejected the claims of all organized religious faith. What is Man? (1906) contains his open assault on selected Christian principles. Fables of Man (1973), a collection from his "posthumous writings" selected from his unpublished sketches, notes, and stories, includes fragments of manuscripts, jottings, and sometimes long, tedious diatribes against a remote God who "doesn't know we are there and wouldn't care if he did."

In his last two years, the great American author grew tired at times with all the splendid acclaim. Refusing to return to the "Hartford House" with all of its painful memories of Susy's death there, he retired to a summer estate he called "Stormfield" at Redding, Connecticut. He suffered painful bouts of angina that kept him fatigued and distracted. Four years earlier, at his 70th birthday celebration in the Red Room of Delmonico's in New York, Mark Twain claimed that it would be something of a cruel trick of nature if he were not allowed "to go out" with the return of Halley's Comet, the harbinger of his birth so many years before. In April, 1910, Mark Twain's conditioned worsened. On the afternoon of the 22^nd, with Clara Clemens Samossoud, his last surviving daughter at his bedside, the great American writer slipped quietly into a coma. At 6:30 p.m., Mark Twain, "America's Chaucer," as one editor wrote in tribute the next morning, died quietly in his sleep. Outside "Stormfield," just barely visible over the horizon, streamed Halley's Comet.