Mark Twain

Life

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Florida, Missouri, in November 1835 and raised from the age of four in Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River that became the model for the St. Petersburg of his boyhood novels. His father died when he was eleven, and he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice, later setting type and writing for newspapers in several cities. In 1857 he trained as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, a trade he loved and practiced until the Civil War closed the river in 1861. The pen name comes from the leadsman’s call for two fathoms of water.

He went west with his brother to the Nevada Territory, tried mining, and turned to journalism in Virginia City and San Francisco. A comic story about a jumping frog, published in 1865, made his name nationally, and a travel book about a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869), made him famous. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Bad investments, above all in a typesetting machine, bankrupted him in 1894, and he paid off his debts with a lecture tour around the world. The deaths of his daughter Susy in 1896 and of his wife in 1904 darkened his later writing. He died at his home in Connecticut in April 1910.

Literary significance

Twain brought the spoken American language into serious literature. His narrators talk rather than write, and his ear for regional speech, together with his comic timing and his anger at hypocrisy and cruelty, gave American fiction a voice distinct from English models. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the central example and the most argued-over novel in the American canon. He was also a celebrated lecturer and humorist in his lifetime, and his aphorisms remain in wide circulation, often attached to him whether he said them or not.

Where to start

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the easier and lighter book and is the natural first read. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the greater one and should follow it.