feature of my life is its literary feature.” My purpose here has been to comprehend that literary feature, which requires a recognition of the constantly changing circumstances of his literary career.
Mark Twain is one of America’s greatest writers. Unlike some of his peers—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, for example—he is widely read. Moreover, he and his writings are still frequently in the news: the discovery of the first half of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript in California, new information about Mark Twain’s support of a black student at Yale Law School and a black artist who wanted to study in Paris, the likely extinction of the kind of Calaveras County frog Mark Twain wrote about, the question of whether high school students should be assigned Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain’s literary career is truly fascinating in its strangeness. How could this genius have had so little sense of what he should do with himself? A contemporary observer of the writer’s life could not have imagined where his career would subsequently take him and what he would write next, if anything, though the unoriginal idea of writing sequels was always a strong temptation.
The connections between the writings of Mark Twain and the life of Samuel L. Clemens begin early. Clemens was blessed by a childhood that as Mark Twain he could often use in his most memorable novels, in his autobiography, and even at times in his travel books. In Tom Sawyer he asserted that “most of the adventures in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine.” Thereafter, in young Sam’s first vocation, that of journeyman printer, he was able to travel far from home to the sights of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. He made extensive literary use of this printing experience in the posthumous book-length fragment “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” in which the narrator is a printer’s apprentice. Sam’s work in printshops also had much to do with his much later investing many thousands of dollars in a machine that would have replaced the typesetter had it worked properly. Its failure had major consequences for the writer.
His next vocation gave him an identity. He became a Mississippi steamboat pilot, where he heard the leadsman’s call “MARK TWAIN,” announcing that the water was just deep enough for the boat to proceed. Choosing “Mark Twain” as his pen name identified him permanently with the great river, as did such books as Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn.
All along in his early years he was sporadically writing for publication, but only when he went west to Nevada and, after an unsuccessful try at silver mining, had to find a new means of survival did he become a newspaperman—specifically, a humorist. For a time he followed a second career as well, that of lecturer; his success in this endeavor would provide him with a reliable source of funds when he was financially pressed. After he went bankrupt, he devoted most of a year to making a lecture tour around the world and then writing a book about his experience.
Mark Twain’s first success was an account of his 1867 trip to Europe and the Holy Land, and thereafter his writing career often took him back to Europe. To a large extent he defined himself and his America vis-à-vis Europe, especially in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but also in Huckleberry Finn, which in its way amounts to an international novel. In time he resided in London, Berlin, Florence, and most notably Vienna, where he and his family lived for nearly two years. His Austrian experiences enriched and conditioned his thinking at the end of the century and brought new life to his writing.
An especially powerful force in Samuel Clemens’s career was his marriage and the associations to which it led. His choice of a wife from genteel Eastern society and his consequent adoption of Hartford, Connecticut, as his home often created contradictions with his earlier life. Was he the irreverent, satirical humorist of the West, or was he the husband of Olivia Langdon Clemens and conventional father of three daughters? Susy, his oldest daughter, was quite aware of her father’s divided identity. She, like her mother, favored the author of The Prince and the Pauper, not the one who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Moreover, the hectic social life that Clemens adopted in Hartford limited his writing time to the summer, when he would hide out on a hillside farm nestled above Elmira, New York, his wife’s hometown.
These tendencies are examined here, in addition to many others: Mark Twain’s continuing interest in the theater and playwriting; his substantial business interests and other distractions from writing; his preference for publishing by subscription rather than by the usual retail method; his preoccupation with religion and his changing views of the Deity; his many unfinished manuscripts, most of which have been published in recent years; the place of illustrations in his books; his on-again, off-again interest in writing his autobiography, and his involvement, again on and off, with politics.
Because during his lifetime Mark Twain was, in his own words, the “most conspicuous person on the planet,”1 how he presented himself is crucial—and interesting. Therefore I have provided many images of the man, photographs taken over the years, some of them little known. In reporting the author’s life I have endeavored to permit Mark Twain to tell his own story through his letters and autobiographical writings. The reading and research undertaken for this book have been a great satisfaction to me, since I have an abiding affection for both Samuel Clemens and his extraordinary legacy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My work was made possible by the extensive resources of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. In its riches critics and scholars have access to sources such as are available for no other American author: thousands of Mark Twain’s letters and thousands of letters he received, his notebooks (including still unpublished ones), the manuscripts of many of his writings, published and unpublished, copies of the collections of other repositories, and dedicated scholars who staff the collection and prepare the marvelous editions that the University of California publishes, such as the first five magisterial volumes of Mark Twain’s letters that have now appeared. For a Mark Twain specialist, being there is to be in heaven, surrounded by angels. To say that I am grateful to Harriet E. Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael Frank, Lin Salamo, Kenneth Sanderson, Louis Suarez-Potts, Anh Bui, and particularly Dr. Robert Hirst, David Briggs, and Brenda Coker would be an understatement, and their support has been personally very gratifying. I am deeply grateful for permission to publish Mark Twain’s previously unpublished words, which I located in the Mark Twain Papers, to reproduce photographs found there, and to make use of the papers of Isabel Lyon, housed there. Quite as important, truly indispensable, has been the support my wife Katherine has given me through dark days.
I am grateful for the assistance of colleagues, associates, and friends, especially Alan Gribben, who read the entire manuscript in its penultimate stage and made hundreds of suggestions; R. Kent Rasmussen, author of the invaluable Mark Twain A to Z, who identified a shocking number of mistakes; Louis J. Budd, Great Authority on Mark Twain, my friend and neighbor, and always helpful; Carl Dolmetsch, whose work on Mark Twain’s years in Vienna is arguably the most important contribution to Mark Twain biography in the last twenty years; another friend and neighbor, Mary Boewe; Michael Kiskis, an authority on Mark Twain’s autobiography; Herbert S. Bailey; Howard Baetzhold; Salli Benedict; Alberta A. Booth; Kevin J. Bochynski; Isabelle Budd; Gregg Camfield; Sherwood Cummings; Hamlin Hill; Horst Kruse; Joe McCullough; Bruce Michelson; Paula Miller; Elaine Durham Otto, a superb copyeditor; Tracy Sayles; Barbara Schmidt; Gretchen Sharlow; Kenneth Silverman; Laura Skandera-Trombley; David E. E. Sloane; Thomas A. Tenney; and Jim Zwick. I am also grateful to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City for permission to quote from Mark Twain’s autobiographical sketch, MA 1405, which it owns. I thank the heirs of Isabel Lyon for permission to quote from her diary, and both the Mark Twain House, Hartford, and the Vassar College Library for permission to reproduce photographs owned by those institutions. I have made use, with gratitude, of the scholarship and insights that other commentators have made during the past two decades. The resources of the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been a constant boon.
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