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Biography: Life of Mark Twain
LIFE IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.--The author known by the pen name of Mark Twain, which is the river
phrase for two fathoms of water, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 as Samuel L. Clemens. He
says of his birthplace: "The village contained a hundred people, and I
increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in
history ever did for any other town." When he was two and a half years old,
the family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi, thirty miles away.
The most impressionable years of his boyhood were spent in Hannibal, which
he calls "a loafing, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town." He
attended only a common school, a picture of which is given in The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Even this schooling ceased at the age of twelve,
when his father died. Like Benjamin Franklin and W. D. Howells, the boy
then became a printer, and followed this trade in various places for nearly
eight years, traveling east as far as the City of New York. He next became
a "cub," or under pilot, on the Mississippi River. After an eighteen
months' apprenticeship, he was an excellent pilot, and he received two
hundred and fifty dollars a month for his services. He says of these days:
"Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that
I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel
when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was
suspended, my occupation was gone." For an inimitable account of these
days, the first twenty-one chapters of his Life on the Mississippi (1883)
should be read.
"... in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly
acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to
be found in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in
upon me, that the average shore employment requires as much as forty
years to equip a man with this sort of education.... When I find a
well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm
personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him
before--met him on the river." [Footnote: Life on the Mississippi,
Chapter XVIII.]
No other work in American literature or history can take the place of this
book and of his three great stories (pp. 359-361), which bring us face to
face with life in the great Mississippi Valley in the middle of the
nineteenth century.
LIFE IN THE FAR WEST.--In 1861 he went to Nevada as private secretary to
his brother, who had been appointed secretary of that territory. Mark Twain
intended to stay there but a short time. He says, "I little thought that I
would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or
seven uncommonly long years."
The account of his experiences in our far West is given in the volume
called Roughing It (1871). This book should be read as a chapter in the
early history of that section. The trip from St. Joseph to Nevada by stage,
the outlaws, murders, sagebrush, jackass rabbits, coyotes, mining
camps,--all the varied life of the time--is thrown distinctly on the screen
in the pages of Roughing It. While in the West, he caught the mining
fever, but he soon became a newspaper reporter and editor, and in this
capacity he discovered the gold mine of his genius as a writer. The
experience of these years was only second in importance to his remarkable
life in the Mississippi Valley. No other American writer has received such
a variety of training in the university of human nature.
LATER LIFE.--In 1867, he supplemented his purely American training with a
trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. The story of his journey is given
in The Innocents Abroad (1869), the work which first made him known in
every part of the United States. A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Following
the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897), are records of other
foreign travels. While they are largely autobiographical, and show in an
unusually entertaining way how he became one of the most cosmopolitan of
our authors, these works are less important than those which throb with the
heart beats of that American life of which he was a part in his younger
days.
In 1884 he became a partner in the publishing house of Charles L. Webster
and Co. This firm incurred risks against his advice, and failed. The
failure not only swallowed up every cent that he had saved, but left him,
past sixty, staggering under a load of debt that would have been a despair
to most young men. Like Sir Walter Scott in a similar misfortune, Mark
Twain made it a point of honor to assume the whole debt. He lectured, he
wrote, he traveled, till finally, unlike Scott, he was able to pay off the
last penny of the firm's indebtedness. His life thus set a standard of
honor to Americans, which is to them a legacy the peer of any left by any
author to his nation.
After his early pioneer days, his American homes were chiefly in New
England. For many years he lived in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1908 he went
to a new home at Redding, Connecticut. His last years were saddened by the
death of his daughter and his wife. His death in 1910 made plain the fact
that few American authors had won a more secure place in the affections of
all classes.
It does not seem possible that the life of any other American author can
ever closely resemble his. He had Elizabethan fullness of experience. Even
Sir Walter Raleigh's life was no more varied; for Mark Twain was a printer,
pilot, soldier, miner, newspaper reporter, editor, special correspondent,
traveler around the world, lecturer, biographer, writer of romances,
historian, publisher, and philosopher.
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