Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri. The family soon moved to the more promising town of Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam spent a joyous boyhood of the Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn kind in a setting of a wide river, great forests, a mysterious cave and a suitably scary haunted house.

Sam’s carefree boyhood and his formal education came to an end with his father’s death in 1847. Hoping to support their mother and sisters, his older brother Orion started a newspaper, and Sam, 11 years old, went to work setting type. When Sam turned 18, he set forth to find his place in the world; and over the next 15 years he worked as a printer in different American towns and cities.

In the 1850s, he learned the pilot’s trade and spent some of his happiest years steering boats up and down the Mississippi. Later, he adopted a pseudonym Mark Twain, an expression used by steamboat men when testing the depth of the channel. The job of piloting lasted until the boom days of the river trade were cut off by the Civil War. During the Civil War, Twain was for a short time a soldier in the Confederate Army. But soon (in two weeks) he abandoned the military life for that of a silver and gold prospector in Nevada. He found little silver and gold there, but he did discover the rich mine of story-telling. In Nevada he got into journalism of the masculine humorous sort which flourished in the Far West.

He financed many inventions and get-rich schemes and eventually set up a large-scale publishing house. In 1870 he married and settled in Hartford, Connecticut (he had got one son and three daughters). In 1894 his publishing-house failed, and he faced financial ruin. Refusing to accept bankruptcy, he paid off his debts dollar for dollar, earning enough to do so by publishing his works and by making a lecture trip around the world. In 1907, Oxford University gave Mark Twain an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

His Major Works:

• Travel Narratives:

“The Innocents Abroad” 1869

“Roughing It” 1872

“A Tramp Abroad” 1880

“Following the Equator” 1897

• Novels

“The Gilded Age” (1873)

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” 1876

“The Prince and the Pauper” 1882

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” 1884

“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” 1889

“Pudd’n Head Wilson” 1894

“The Mysterious Stranger” 1916

• Autobiography (1924, 1940)

“Life on the Mississippi” 1883

Mark Twain is the most celebrated humorist in American history. His ability to make us laugh has contributed to the singular popularity of his books, not just in Twain’s own time, but in the following generations. Since humour is by nature very difficult to translate from language to language, it is even more surprising to find that Twain’s appeal has travelled throughout the world.

Mark Twain had the happy ability of always finding the best word, and more than any other classical fictionist, he captured the American colloquial speech in print (his famous vernacular style – the everyday spoken language of people in a particular locality, and writing that imitates or suggests such a language). In addition, he had a genius for creating living memorable characters.

Printer, pilot, soldier, silver-miner, gold-washer, lecturer, traveller, businessman, novelist, autobiographer, Mark Twain had led an active life in the very center of the American experience. Yet, he had grown weary and depressed. Born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet had blazed in the sky, he was awaiting the comet’s return in 1910. Having “come in” with the comet, he predicted he would “go out” with it. And so he did.

Many later writers paid tribute to Twain’s genius. But William Faulkner spoke for all the Americans when he said, “All of us… are his heirs”.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Mark Twain visited Russia. He was in Yalta, Odessa and Sevastopol.