Mark Twain

Introduction

Twain, Mark (30 Nov. 1835-21 Apr. 1910), author and lecturer, was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, the son of John Marshall Clemens, a lawyer, and Jane Lampton. Though he would intimate in good faith that his father descended from the gentry, his paternal grandparents were slave-owning farmers in Virginia, and his maternal grandparents in Kentucky, “while better educated and more prosperous”, were not wealthy (Powers, 5).

His father, having moved to Kentucky, was licensed to practice law in 1822. His parents moved in 1823 to Tennessee, where John Clemens accumulated a huge tract, perhaps as much as 75,000 acres, that would for decades figure in family councils as a potential fortune. “He had minimal success as an attorney and speculator” (Hill, 28). In 1835 he embarked on various ventures in tiny Florida, Missouri, the home of John Adams Quarles, a capable farmer and storekeeper married to Jane Clemens's younger sister.

In 1839 John Clemens moved his family to Hannibal, Missouri. As late as 1830 Hannibal had about thirty inhabitants; it was not incorporated until 1845. Samuel Clemens emerged from early frailty into a lively boyhood, though episodes of sleepwalking indicated strong tensions, probably increased by the deaths of a sister and then a brother. His parents, while apparently compatible, struck him as sharply different. His father, careful to come across as a gentleman, was a principled Whig and essentially a freethinker in theology who intimidated him, seeming stiff and austere; his mother, resilient, warm, comfortably religious, and playful, impressed him as a nonconformist.

Hindsight cannot discover unusual promise (or lack of it), though his novels suggest that his boyhood involved much imaginative drama. Highly detailed reminiscences almost fifty years later proved that even casual events were embedded in his psyche. His distinctive way of processing experience was forming, and he remembered his surprise when his spontaneous opinions and phrasings first struck others as humorous. Boyhood ended before his twelfth birthday, when his father died. He attended school sporadically for two more years, took various odd jobs, and apprenticed with a printer, with whom he boarded. In 1851 he changed to typesetter and editorial assistant for his brother Orion's newspaper, which soon published his first known sketch. As his self-confidence rose, he placed a humorous yarn in a Boston periodical, already demonstrating the energetic ambition that drove his career despite the pose of laziness. His early writing showed “instinctive exuberance, egalitarianism, irreverence, and boldness”. (Hill, 54)

River Piloting on the Mississippi

In 1853 he joined his married sister in St. Louis, uprooted not only by adventurousness but also by the family's sense that they could not prosper in Hannibal; Jane Clemens and two other sons soon moved to Iowa. Then he tried to find a steady job as a typesetter in New York City and Philadelphia while writing a few travel letters to Orion's Muscatine (Iowa) Journal. In 1855 he joined Orion's next enterprise, a print shop in Keokuk, Iowa, but he was soon planning, with friends, to seek a fortune in ...