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“America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California”   –Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, one of America’s most renowned writers and humorists. Samuel Clemens wrote over 40 books—several of which were only published after his death—in addition to any number of newspaper columns and letters. Some of his works were fiction; some of them were non-fiction stories and travels diaries.  And most of it was spiced with humor and wit, and still makes for a fun read today.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri inc 1835. When he was a child his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, near the Mississippi River. At the age of 12, after his father died, he dropped out of school and became an apprentice typesetter for local newspapers. Eventually he started working for his brother, Orion Clemens, who owned several newspapers.

On the Road (and River)

Clemens traveled around the USA, supporting him self by doing a variety of jobs. For a period of several years he worked as a steamboat pilot (a very demanding and lucrative job at the time) and during that time he got the inspiration for the pen name by which he would later be known. “Mark Twain” is a term denoting a depth of two fathoms (4 yards, or 3.7 meters) measured on a sounding line (a weighted rope used to measure depths before computers started doing it for us), and on riverboats of that era was called out as an “all clear” sign. “By the mark twain!” meant that the water ahead was two fathoms deep, which was deep enough for the boat to cross safely.

Westward Bound

Twain’s days as a steamboat pilot were numbered. After the Civil War broke out, business travel on the Mississippi came to a halt, since the river became an invasion route for the Union army. Twain then joined his brother Orion on a journey to Nevada, where Orion got a new job. For a year Twain panned for gold and silver and produced comic columns about it for the nearby Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He would later use the experiences of these years as the basis for his book, “Roughing It”. While writing for the Territorial Enterprise, Twain became involved with a rival journalist, who insisted on a duel. However, Twain decided to leave the area and move to San Francisco, so he wouldn’t break the town law against dueling.  In San Francisco, Twain found work in various newspapers and became known for his often moralistic, though humorous, diatribes against public figures and institutions. Shortly afterward, he had a story published.

Making a Name

His first story to get published, and garner him his first real taste of nation-wide publicity, was “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, a tall tale which was published by Saturday Press. His first book to be published was “The Innocents Abroad”, which told the story of his five month journey with a group of religious pilgrims on a Holy Land expedition to Europe and the Middle East.  The journey was paid for by the Alta California newspaper, and its purpose was for Twain to send letters describing the entire journey; the book was a collection of these journal entries. “The Innocents Abroad” was published by a by a subscription house that sold books door-to-door, and the book’s success came as quite a surprise.  

Claim to Fame

Twain continued to write and in 1876 he published his book “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, a novel about the adventures of a young boy who lived in a Mississippi River town in the 1840s. He would later go on to write about Huckleberry Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer’s. Published in 1885, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is considered to be one of the greatest works in American literature. He wrote many other great works, but if we were to touch on each and every one of them, we’d need a couple more posts…

Mark Twain had a way with words, both written and spoken, and a lot of his witticisms and observations are still known and quoted today. One quote which I recently learned originated with him is, “Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been”. I can’t explain why, but I can really relate to this quote. Another one of his quotes that I like is “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing”; after you read some of his work you can see he really believed it .

The End of a Legend

Mark Twain passed away in 1910 and in the years since his death, the mass of his literary achievement has only increased.  His cleverness and penchant for satire gave him the prestige and publicity that continue to this day: many of the places where he had lived or worked are preserved as museums, not to mention the various schools and structures named after him. Many readers and critics agree that he was the “father of the American literature” (as H. L. Mencken has written about him), and many awards in the fields of arts, writing and literature are named in his honor.

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