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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Samuel Clemens Biography CLEMENS, Samuel Langhorne (1835-1910) An American novelist and humorist, better known as "Mark Twain" – a name derived from calls used in taking soundings on the Mississippi, and first employed by Mr. Clemens in newspaper work in 1863. It had previously been taken as a pen name by Capt. Isaiah Sellers in the New Orleans Picayune. Mr. Clemens was born at Florida, Mo., Nov. 30, 1835. He received the common-school education of a frontier town and, becoming an expert compositor, worked at this trade in St. Louis, New York, and other cities. In 1851 he gave up printing and became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, accumulating a fund of experience that he was later to turn to unique literary account in his Life on the Mississippi and other books. The Civil War closed this livelihood to him. He joined a volunteer squad of Confederate sympathizers, remaining with the command for a few weeks, but seeing no active service. Then he went to Nevada with his brother, who had received a political appointment there, and at Virginia City became a reporter and staff writer for the Territorial Enterprise, revealing here first to the public his powers of humorously exaggerated description and sarcastic wit. From Nevada he followed the trend to San Francisco, tried mining in Calaveras County, made a voyage to the Sandwich Islands, and attracted attention as a humorous lecturer and writer of localized fiction. The success of his lectures and a book called by the name of the first story, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), led to his participating, with journalistic intent, in an excursion to the Orient. His letters about his trip, in revised form, became the well-known Innocents Abroad (1869), which won him fame on both continents. Then for two years (1869–71) Clemens edited the Buffalo Express. In the last-named year he married Miss Olivia L. Langdon, and established himself in Hartford, Conn. In 1872 he gathered reminiscences of Far-Western life in Roughing It, and became a frequent contributor to magazines and journals, chiefly in a vein of exaggerated humor. His next book was The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, and afterward successfully dramatized. Then came The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). A second trip to Europe furnished material for A Tramp Abroad (1880); then followed The Stolen White Elephant (1882); The Prince and – the Pauper (1882), an historical romance; Life on the Mississippi (1883); and Huckleberry Finn (1885). In 1884 he engaged in the publishing enterprise of Charles L. Webster and Company, the failure of which, about a decade later, led him to make a lecture tour around the world (1895–96), by means of which he reëstablished his fortune and more than cleared his commercial honor. For 10 years after 1889 Mr. Clemens lived chiefly in Europe. During this period he published: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889); The American Claimant (1892); Merry Tales (1892); The £1,000,000 Bank Note (1893); The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894); Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896); Following the Equator (1897), known in England as More Tramps Abroad; The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), a collection of sketches; and after his return to America, A Double-Barreled Detective Story (1902), Christian Science (1903), A Dog's Tale (1904), Eve's Diary (1906), and The $30,000 Bequest (1906). In 1907 he made a sojourn in England, which was a long ovation to him. Everywhere he was received with the warmest regard and esteem, and Oxford honored him with the degree of Litt.D. Although best known, and rightly so, as a humorist, Mr. Clemens had a thoroughly serious side to his character, as shown in later years by his public discussion in articles or speeches of various questions that aroused his sympathy or indignation. But his best, and per haps his most permanent work, was done as a picaresque novelist in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stories which preserve, as only works of genius can, frontier types that now have vanished for ever or survive only in remote corners of the land, and which are peopled with characters, old and young, that well deserve literary immortality. No other writer has so vividly portrayed the irresponsible American boy, or given his readers so adequate an impression of the large, homely, spontaneous life led by native Americans in the great valley of the Mississippi, as has Samuel Clemens. His humor, like Lincoln's, characteristically American, has its coarser side, to be sure. "Mark Twain's" fun often sins against good taste and is irreverent and flippant at wrong times and places. But his comic force and fertility offset all defects; and beneath what seems reckless levity there is sound morality as well as clear-eyed shrewdness and hard common sense. The predilection which he vaunts in much of his work for exploiting the mean aspect of things venerable or impressive betrays a touch of the spirit of American philistinism. Of this the Innocents Abroad is an instance. But not so Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; in those, his best books, he appears as a master of humor and pathetic suggestion, and a truly creative genius. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. V (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 439-440. |