The Life of Mark Twain

He was a great lecturer. His speeches and sketches were delivered in eloquent and humorous style.

He was a great traveler. Although Mark Twain is a truly American writer, his adventures spanned the globe. He was a man of America--he was a man of the world.

• Born--He was born Samuel Clemens, later to be known as Mark Twain, in Florida, Missouri in 1835.

  I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. . . The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.

• Hannibal--In 1839, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, Missouri on the Mississippi River. This is where the young Mark Twain spent his boyhood. His family was poor. His father died when he was eleven. One of his first jobs was setting type for his brother Orion's newspaper in Hannibal.

  In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy everybody was poor but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.

• Teenage traveler--At the age of 18, in 1853, Twain left home for a year. He traveled to the East finding work as a printer in St. Louis, New York City and Philadelphia. In 1854, he returned to work for his brother Orion who was then living in Iowa.

• The Mississippi--It was in 1857 that Mark Twain entered one of the most formative periods of his life. He became a cub pilot on Mississippi river boats. In the fall of 1856, he moved to Cincinnati. The next spring he boarded a riverboat to New Orleans. He was headed for adventure in South America, but on the way down the river he persuaded the pilot, Horace Bixby, to teach him to be a pilot. In two years he had his pilot's license. He continued to work the river until the Civil War ended the river traffic in 1861.

  When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for Pará [in South America] and discovered that there weren't any and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century. It had not occurred to me to inquire about these particulars before leaving Cincinnati, so there I was. I couldn't get to the Amazon. I had no friends in New Orleans and no money to speak of. I went to Horace Bixby and asked him to make a pilot out of me.

• Nevada Territory--In 1861, Orion Clemens was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. Mark Twain and Orion left for the West by stagecoach. It was there he began as a writer.

  I was in New Orleans when Louisiana went out of the Union, January 26, 1861, and I started north the next day. . . In June I joined the Confederates in Ralls County, Missouri, as a second lieutenant under General Tom Harris and came near having the distinction of being captured by Colonel Ulysses S. Grant. I resigned after two weeks' service in the field, explaining that I was "incapacitated by fatigue" through persistent retreating.

• "Josh"--He began to write humorous stories of his western adventures which landed him a job with the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. At first he signed his stories with the pen name "Josh." In a story to the Enterprise on February 2, 1863, he used the name Mark Twain for the first time. The term was used by pilots on the Mississippi to indicate two fathoms of depth.

• San Francisco--In 1864, Mark Twain was involved, somewhat reluctantly, in a dueling incident--an incident that like much in Twain's life was part comedy. However, dueling had just become illegal in Nevada, so he left the territory rather quietly and quickly and landed in San Francisco. There he worked as a reporter.

  After leaving Nevada I was a reporter on the Morning Call of San Francisco. I was more than that--I was "the" reporter. There was enough work for one and a little over, but not enough for two--according to Mr. Barnes's idea, and he was the proprietor and therefore better situated to know about it than other people.

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog--While in San Francisco, Twain also wrote for a number of magazines. In November, 1865, his story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" appeared in the New York Saturday Press . From this he gained a national reputation.

• A start as a lecturer--In all, Mark Twain spent five years in the West. He made a voyage to the Pacific where he reported on the sugar interests of the Hawaiian Islands. He returned after 4 or 5 months and was talked into giving a lecture series by Thomas McGuire who owned several theaters. This was the beginning of Twain's career as a lecturer.

• An Innocent Abroad--In 1867, he left for a cruise on the Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land. He wrote humorous accounts of the trip in letters to newspapers. Later these letters were brought together into a travel book The Innocents Abroad, which brought him instant national popularity.

  I was very young in those days [when writing "Innocents Abroad"], exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words a day--nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me.

• A cameo romance--It was on his cruise on the Quaker City that he met Charles Langdon who showed him an ivory miniature of his sister in Elmira, NY. It was love at first sight. He met her in December, 1867. She was 22 years old. The courtship was long and frustrating for Twain. He proposed a number of times, but was rebuffed. He invented reasons for coming to her home. At one time he was thrown by a horse in front of her house as he was leaving after a visit. He was not injured, but he feigned injury for three days to be near her and to forward his proposal. She finally consented. In February, 1870, they were married.

  She was slender and beautiful and girlish--and she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm and absolutely limitless affection. She was always frail in body and she lived upon her spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible.
  (Mark Twain writing about his wife)

• The Hartford Years--Mark Twain and his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1871. They built a fabulous house with some features that suggested a Mississippi River steamboat. This is where they lived there for the next 20 years. Their four children were Susy, Clara and Jean, and a son Langdon who died in infancy. These were Twain's formative years when he wrote much of his best material. Tom Sawyer was Published in 1876, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in 1884.

  It was by accident that I found out that a book is pretty sure to get tired along about the middle and refuse to go on with its work until its powers and its interest should have been refreshed by rest and its depleted stock of raw materials reinforced by lapse of time.

• The world tour--In 1895, Mark Twain made a grand world lecture tour to pay debts from business losses. The tour was highly successful, and restored Twain's financial stability.

• Deaths in the family--In 1904, his wife, Olivia, died. Her health had never been good. She had fallen on ice when she was a teenager and had never fully recovered her physical strength after the accident. His daughter Susy, his favorite, had died while he was on tour in 1895-1896. In 1909, the youngest daughter, Jean, died.

  Sunday Evening, June 5, 1904--11:15 o'clock. She has been dead two hours. It is impossible. The words have no meaning. But they are true; I know it without realizing it. She was my life, and she is gone; she was my riches and I am a pauper.
  (Mark Twain at his wife's death)

• The final bitter years--Twain became bitter toward the end of his life. He had lost his loved ones. He had invested in numerous business schemes that had gone bad. As a result of all of this his health began to decline.

• Death--Mark Twain died April 21, 1910. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

(Italicized insets are from the Autobiography of Mark Twain.)