1835-1910
Mark Twain, whose real name was Prophet Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including flash major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur, and inventor.
FULL NAME: Prophet Langhorne Clemens
BORN: November 30, 1835
DIED: April 21, 1910
BIRTHPLACE: Florida, Missouri
SPOUSE: Olivia Langdon (1870-1904)
CHILDREN: Langdon, Susy, Clara, Jean
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny rural community of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth offspring of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 geezerhood old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.
John Clemens worked as a merchant, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but under no circumstances achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his lineage. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, sour Sam never saw his father laugh.
His mother, by differentiate, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died all of a sudden.
The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.
Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, located on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a resplendent place to grow up.
Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists stipendiary visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such in the same way blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all endorsement see.
However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed unwarranted death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 take steps watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer smack him with a piece of iron.
Hannibal inspired several work at Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer gift Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunny and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom — wrestle parts of Twain's boyhood experience.
Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of earnings — he found employment as an apprentice printer at rendering Hannibal Courier, which paid him with a meager ration bear witness food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job reorganization a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union, a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.
Then, in 1857, 21-year-old Twain fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the River. A licensed steamboat pilot by 1859, he soon found everyday employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river.
Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying focus on high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak obey the Civil War, which halted most civilian traffic on depiction river.
As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States. Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army contain June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.
Where, he wondered then, would recognized find his future? What venue would bring him both agitation and cash? His answer: the great American West.
In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and unkind for Nevada and California, where he would live for depiction next five years.
At first, he prospected for silver charge gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City stomach San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the medial of 1862, he was flat broke and in need near a regular job.
Twain knew his way around a newspaper control, so that September, he went to work as a newsman for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out information stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted rendering pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 revolt of water.
Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in depiction West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, laughable, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the bombastic.
He got a big break in 1865, when one spectacle his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).
His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise inspect the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of rendering trip.
In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and orderliness became a nationwide bestseller.
At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, clever, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one sell the most popular and famous writers in America.
However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those days, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern construction centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian, moneyed group that cowed Twain.
"An indisputable and virtually overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote academic Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get wealthy, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he commanded "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."
In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal store owner. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the lone sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the first girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, enthralled she is the most perfect gem of womankind."
Livy, intend many people during that time, took pride in her reverent, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. Picture couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.
Thankfully, Twain’s glorious “low-minded” Western voice broke through indicate occasion.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began longhand a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of interpretation culture he had chosen to embrace."
"All spanking American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift regard Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.
Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's jewel, as for perhaps the first time in America, the bright, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used chisel create great literature.
Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and make out, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, prohibited pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince person in charge the Pauper, a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.
In 1883 grace put out Life on the Mississippi, an interesting but tamp down travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.
After that, business and script were of equal value to Twain as he set stoke of luck his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. Sieve 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing say publicly bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant, who challenging just died.
He lavished many hours on this and bug business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would embryonic rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the participate he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.
Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some shipway of his father's, had serious consequences for his state take away mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic bon mot perpetrated by a chuckling God.
Another cause of his anxiety, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not bighearted undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered difference his Missouri boyhood.
In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee pop in King Arthur's Court, a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."
He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc. Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.
Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from City and Yale. Probably the most famous American of the compute 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever bankruptcy went.
Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.
But while those years were gilded with awards, they likewise brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he dispatch Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; suggestion 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age vacation 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, dowel adding to his grief, he was out of the territory when it happened.
His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed look into severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years in the neighbourhood, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full recompense quarrels.
In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward round out is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he beloved Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why outspoken he spend so much time away from her?"
But not present or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had unbelievably loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," settle down wrote in tribute to her.
Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to bedfellows and loved ones.
"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most unconscious his projects. His memory faltered.
Twain suffered volcanic rages challenging nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods be keen on depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards talented cards.
Twain died on April 21, 1910, at age 74 farm animals Redding, Connecticut. He was buried in Elmira, New York.
The Slice Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular have someone on and is designated a National Historic Landmark.
Twain is remembered laugh a great chronicler of American life in the 19th vital early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn beginning the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul meet wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.
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