Samuel clemmens biography

His popularity soared so much that he began his samuel clemmens biography lecture tour upon his return to the United States. While on tour, he established himself as a fascinating stage performer. The year found Twain in New York City. He had been hired by the Alta Californiaa San Francisco newspaper, to continue his travel writing.

Twain signed up for a five-and-a-half-month-long steamship cruise. The steamer stopped at ports throughout Europe on its way to the Holy Land Israel. Twain sent the paper letters full of descriptions and humorous observations. They proved so popular that they were compiled into his first best-selling book, The Innocents Abroad, in The trip to Europe turned out to be beneficial to him in his personal life as well.

On the ship, he met a man named Charles Langdon, who showed Twain a photo of his sister, Olivia. Twain fell in love with her upon sight, and the two married in After a brief stay in Buffalo, New York, the couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, with their son in They rented a home in Nook Farm, a colony of writers and artists. The following year, Twain published a book of his frontier adventures and recollections.

He called it Roughing It. That same year, daughter Susy was born. Langdon, Twain's only son, died at the age of 2 years of diphtheria an infection of the throat resulting in high fever, breathing difficulty, and sometimes heart and brain damage. One night at a dinner party at Nook Farm, Twain was complaining to his dinner guests that there was nothing of literary value available on the market.

He was challenged to remedy that situation by writing something of merit. Together with friend Charles Dudley Warner —who also happened to be a publisher, he wrote The Gilded Age in The novel attacked political corruption, big businessand America's obsession with wealth. Although the novel did not sell as well as some of his others, Twain was credited with coming up with the term "Gilded Age," the name that would be given to the samuel clemmens biography era in which he lived.

InTwain's nineteen-room mansion in Hartford was built. The author designed the house himself, and it was architecturally unlike any other house in the neighborhood. Twain had incorporated various styles and elements from buildings he had visited throughout his world travels. Twain and his family lived in their Hartford home for seventeen years.

The writer spent his happiest and most productive years there, as two more daughters were born during that time and he published his most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain was hailed as the era's greatest humorist. Wherever he went, crowds gathered to hear him speak. Twain wrote several other novels during those years, and all sold well.

InTwain established the Charles L. Webster Company, his own publishing firm. He would now have control over his work and make sizeable profits. Inhe agreed to write the memoirs of former U. Grant —85; served — Grant's widow earned four times that much on royalties percentage of the cost of each volume sold. Twain's writing made him a great deal of money, but the author was not as wise with investments as he was with words.

After years of making poor investments, Twain was near bankruptcy the formal declaration of being unable to repay financial debt. When his publishing company failed, Twain was forced to find some way to make money. He and his family embarked on a lecture circuit that took them traveling around the world. This type of traveling literary show was known as a Chautauqua pronounced shuh-TAW-kwuh; see box.

InSusy Clemens was visiting the family home in Hartford. At just twenty-four, she died of meningitis an infection of the lining of the brain there and was found in the bathtub. Unable to return to a home that could no longer bring them happiness, the Twain family never lived in Hartford again. They sold the property in That is our democratic privilege.

Most parents think they know more than you do; and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgement. The traveling lecture series, along with the publication of a book of essays regarding the experience, restored Twain's finances, but the writer's final years were dark. During his travels, he witnessed various wars.

From until his death, Twain publicly declared himself an anti-imperialist one who is against territorial expansion. He even served as vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. Mark Twain's writing in the later years reflected his attitude toward government and his sadness over the loss of Susy. His public appearances took on the same tone, and his antigovernment writings and speeches threatened his financial situation.

Some considered him a traitor to his country. Magazines began to refuse to publish his works because of his political beliefs. Along with all the other changes and reforms going on throughout the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era were educational and religious reforms. Ina Methodist minister named John H. Vincent — partnered with an Akron, Ohio, businessman named Lewis Miller — Miller, who made his fortune by inventing farm machinery, happened to be the father-in-law of inventor Thomas Edison.

Samuel clemmens biography: Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30,

Vincent and Miller created a series of summer courses aimed at Sunday-school teachers. These in-depth training seminars were held at Lake Chautauqua in New York and had a summer-camp atmosphere. The event quickly became well known throughout America. Soon, subjects other than religion were added. Before the turn of the century, hotels, lecture buildings, and permanent homes were built at the lake.

Not everyone who wanted to attend could afford to travel to the summer school, so smaller assemblies similar to the one at the lake were organized in various parts of the country. Usually these assemblies were held at campgrounds near a lake or a wooded area. The Chautauqua, as the event became known, took to the road and began traveling the nation in In addition to lectures and speakers, the event expanded to include live music, theatrical shows, and even magic shows.

Many famous celebrities and reformers spoke at the Chautauqua, with Mark Twain being perhaps the most famous. Twain was a gifted storyteller who fascinated his audience for hours. Even two U. Grant and Theodore Rooseveltmade appearances during the early years of the event. The railroads made it possible for middle-class folks to attend a Chautauqua, even if it was not coming to their hometown.

The traveling show brought New York—style culture to even the most rural corners of America. At one point in time, one in five Americans had attended a Chautauqua. The Chautauqua, once a traveling phenomenon of culture and entertainment, lost its appeal after World War I —18when cars, radio programs, and movies gained a place in society.

Yet even in the twenty-first century, Chautauqua continues to travel on a reduced scale throughout the country. Despite the controversy, many Mark Twain fans remained devoted to the humorist. His popularity overseas rivaled that of his appeal at home; anti-imperialist or not, he was still one of America's most popular celebrities. Bythe Twains had been living in New York City for three years.

Twain's wife, Livy, had never enjoyed particularly robust health, and after the tragic loss of Susy, her emotional health suffered as well. In hopes a change of climate would help her, Livy's doctor suggested the couple travel to Italy. All hopes remained unfulfilled, and she died there in the spring of Twain was devastated and returned to their home in New York City.

He began dictating his memoirs that year. His autobiography remained unfinished at his death, and was published ten years later. That same year, Twain celebrated his seventieth birthday with friends and fellow writers. The party, hosted by Harper's Weekly editor George Harvey —featured a forty-piece orchestra and fifteen formal speeches and toasts.

The event was the talk of New York, and reports of it appeared in newspapers and magazines. Twain's advancing years did little to slow him down, and he continued to immerse himself in work to keep busy. That year, he traveled the country, lecturing and performing. By this time, Twain had taken to wearing a white linen suit in public.

Very few photos taken in his later years show him wearing anything else. InTwain reluctantly agreed to let his daughter Jean be committed to an asylum. She was an epileptic one who suffers from uncontrollable seizures caused by a brain disorder and could no longer be cared for by loved ones. She died from a seizure in InTwain moved to what would be his final house.

The estate, located in Redding, Connecticut, was named Stormfield. The following year, Twain's daughter Clara married. Twain's health was deteriorating, and on April 21,he died of heart failure. He was seventy-four years old. His death made front-page news in newspapers across the globe. Tributes to Twain's life were published for weeks after his death, as well as examples of his humor, quotations, and other writings.

As evidence of his universal appeal, many different regions claimed the great writer, raised in Hannibal, Missouri, as their own. Articles in western papers talked about his western-ness; to those in the East, he was an easterner. Twain was one of those rare writers who belonged to all of America. Twain wrote simply about simple things, though he also had an edgy side, as demonstrated by his antigovernment slants.

But he showed America its weaknesses and strengths, even as they sometimes blurred into one another. He examined not only his own life but also that of everyone else around him, whether cowboy or farmer, king or poor person, criminal or businessman. America came to depend on Twain to show them how, despite all the changes the country was going through, its people came together to form a nation.

Perhaps inventor Thomas Edison —; see entry said it best. Grant, Edison quipped, "An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Multiple reprints. Berkeley: University of California Press, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain. Edited by Alex Ayres.

Reprint, New York: Perennial, Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age. Hartford, CT: American Publishing, Reprint, New York: Modern Library, Willis, Resa. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, Reprint, Routledge, The Mark Twain House and Museum. Mark Twain. Railton, Stephen. Mark TwainAmerican humorist and novelist, captured a world audience with stories of boyhood adventure and with commentary on man's shortcomings that is humorous even while it probes, often bitterly, the roots of human behavior.

Bred among American traditions of frontier journalism, and influenced by such cracker-box humorists as Artemus Ward and by the tradition of the tall tale, Mark Twain scored his first successes as a writer and lecturer with his straight-faced, laconic recitation of incredible comic incidents in simple, direct, colloquial language. His was an oral style, and his principal contribution is sometimes thought to be the creation of a genuinely native idiom.

Some contemporaries considered Mark Twain's language uncouth and crude when compared with the well-mannered prose of William Dean Howells or the intricately contrived expression of Henry James. Though conventionally less disciplined and less consistently successful than either, Mark Twain surpassed both in popular esteem and is remembered with them as foremost in the creation of prose fiction in the United States during the late 19th century.

He spent his boyhood in nearby Hannibal, on the bank of the Mississippi River, observing its busy life, fascinated by its romance, but chilled by the violence and bloodshed it bred. Twelve years old when his lawyer father died, he began working as an apprentice, then a compositor, with local printers, contributing occasional squibs to local newspapers.

At 17 his comic sketch "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" was published by a sportsmen's magazine in Boston. In Clemens began wandering as a journeyman printer to St. Louis, Chicago, New Yorkand Philadelphia, settling briefly with his brother, Orion, in lowa before setting out at 22 to make his fortune, he hoped, beside the lush banks of the Amazon River in South America.

Instead, traveling down the Mississippi River, he became a steamboat river pilot until the Civil War interrupted traffic. In Clemens traveled to Nevada, where he speculated carelessly in timber and silver mining. He settled down to newspaper work in Virginia Cityuntil his reckless pen and redheaded temper brought him into conflict with local authorities; it seemed profitable to escape to California.

Meanwhile he had adopted the pen name of Mark Twain, a riverman's term for water that was safe, but only just safe, for navigation. Most of his western writing was hastily, often carelessly, done, and he later did little to preserve it. His accounts as published in the newspaper provided the basis for his first successful lectures and years later were collected in Letters from the Sandwich Islands and Letters from Honolulu His travel accounts samuel clemmens biography so well received that he contracted in to become a traveling correspondent for the Alta California ; he would circle the globe, dispatching letters.

Brown They were fresh and racy, alert, informed, and sidesplittingly funny. Their accent was American western humor; their traditional theme was the decay of transatlantic institutions when compared with the energetic freshness of the western life-style. Yet the humor also exposed the traveling American innocents as they haggled through native bazaars, completely innocent of their own outlandish samuel clemmens biography.

Nor was their author exempt from ridicule, for Mark Twain usually wrote of "What fools we mortals be, " accepting his place among the erring race of man. The letters were later revised as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progressand the book immediately made Mark Twain a popular favorite, in demand especially as a lecturer who could keep large audiences in gales of samuel clemmens biography.

In Twain married Olivia Langdon. After a brief residence in upstate New York as an editor and part owner of the Buffalo Express, he moved to Hartford, Conn. With Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Agea quizzical satire on financial speculation and political chicanery, which introduced the character of Colonel Beriah Sellers, a backcountry squire plagued by schemes which might, but never did, bring him sudden fortune.

By this time Mark Twain was famous. Anything he wrote would sell, but his imagination flagged. He collected miscellaneous writings into Sketches New and Old and tried to fit Colonel Sellers into a new book, which finally materialized years later as The American Claimant Meanwhile Mark Twain's account of steamboating experiences for the Atlantic Monthly ; expanded to Life on the Mississippi, captured the beauty, glamour, and menace of the Mississippi.

Boyhood memories of life beside that river were written into The Adventures of Tom Sawyerwhich immediately attracted young and old. With more exotic and foreign settings, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur 's Court attracted readers also, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnin which Mark Twain again returned to the river scenes he knew best, was considered vulgar by many contemporaries.

Tom Sawyer, better organized than Huckleberry Finnis a narrative of innocent boyhood play that inadvertently discovers evil as Tom and Huck witness a murder by Injun Joe in a graveyard at midnight. The boys run away, are thought dead, but turn up at their own funeral. Tom and Huck decide to seek out the murderer, and the reward offered for his capture.

It is Tom and his sweetheart who, while lost in a cave, discover the hiding place of Injun Joe. Though the townspeople unwittingly seal the murderer in the cave, they close the entrance only to keep adventuresome boys like Tom out of future trouble. In the end, it is innocent play and boyish adventuring which really triumph. Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain's finest creation.

Huck lacks Tom's imagination; he is a simple boy with little education. One measure of his character is a proneness to deceit, which seems instinctive, a trait shared by other wild things and relating him to nature—in opposition to Tom's tradition-grounded, book-learned, imaginative deceptions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a loosely strung series of adventures, can be viewed as the story of a quest for freedom and an escape from what society requires in exchange for success.

Joined in flight by a black companion, Jim, who seeks freedom from slavery, Huck discovers that the Mississippi is peaceful though he is found to be only partially correct but that the world along its shores is marred by deceit, including his own, and by cruelty and murder. When the raft on which he and Jim are floating down the river is invaded by two confidence men, Huck first becomes their assistant in swindles but is finally the agent of their exposure.

Jim throughout is a frightened but faithful friend. Huck is troubled by the sin which in the world's eyes he is committing by helping a slave to escape. The thematic climax of the book occurs when Huck decides that if he must go to hell for that sin, very well then, he will go to hell.

Samuel clemmens biography: Samuel Clemens was born on

And he does, as leaving the river he enters again into the world dominated by Tom, which in its seemingly innocent deceit presents an alarming analog to adult pretense. All ends suddenly; Jim has been free all the time, and good people offer to adopt and civilize Huck. But he will have none of it: "I can't stand it, " he says. Whatever its faults, Huckleberry Finn is a classic.

Variously interpreted, it is often thought to suggest more than it reveals, speaking of what man has done to confuse himself about his right relation to nature. It can also be thought to treat of man's failures in dealing with his fellows and of the corruption so deeply engrained that man's only escape is in flight, perhaps even from himself.

Yet it is also an apparently artless story of adventure and escape so simply and directly told that Ernest Hemingway samuel clemmens biography said that all American samuel clemmens biography begins with this book. Its language seems the instinctual language of all men—"a joyous exorcism, " one critic has said. Mark Twain, said H. Mencken, was the first important author to write "genuinely colloquial and native American.

His boy's-eye view of a world distorted by pretense and knavery anticipates the use of a young narrator by numerous important American authors, including Sherwood AndersonErnest Hemingwayand J. Mark Twain's early books were sold by subscription; they sold well, for Twain prided himself on gauging public taste. Many were not issued until subscription agents had secured enough advance orders to make them surely profitable.

As a traveling lecturer, he helped sell his books, and his books helped pack his lectures. He was probably the best-known and certainly among the most prosperous writers of his generation. Unsatisfied, he reached for more. When The Prince and the Pauper did not sell as he thought it should, he established his own publishing firm, which did well for a while.

But Mark Twain was soon in serious trouble. For several years he had been supplying large sums toward the perfecting of a typesetting machine, convinced that it would make his fortune. But in he retreated with his family to Europe, where they could live more cheaply. In the publishing company went bankrupt, and the typesetter failed in competition with less complex rivals.

Mark Twain was deeply in debt. While Mark Twain lectured around the world to pay his debts, Rogers placated creditors, invested his royalties, and arranged new publishing contracts. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilsonan awkwardly constructed story of two boys, one of them African American, switched in their cradles, is sometimes remembered as Mark Twain's second-best book, but it brought little immediate financial assistance.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arca ponderous paean to innocence triumphant, was so serious that Mark Twain at first would not allow his name to be associated with it. Following the Equator was dedicated to Rogers's son. Mark Twain and his family remained in Europe, saddened by the death of one daughter and seeking help for the apparently incurable illness of another.

Like his Colonel Sellers, Mark Twain looked desperately for a scheme to recoup his fortune. Rogers finally steered him out of debt and arranged a publishing contract which ensured Mark Twain and his heirs a handsome income. On his return to the United States inMark Twain rose to new heights of popularity. His publicized insistence on paying every creditor had made him something of a public hero.

He was widely sought as a speaker, and he seemed proud to be the genial companion of people like the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegiethough in private he opposed the principles for which they seemed to stand. His writings grew increasingly bitter, especially after his wife's death in King Leopold's Soliloquy attacked hypocrisy in treatment of inhabitants of the Congo, fulminating against what Mark Twain called "the damn'd human race.

Samuel clemmens biography: Youth. Samuel Clemens, the sixth child

Extracts from Adam's Diary had humorously presented man as a blunderer; Eve's Diarywritten partly in memory of his wife, showed man saved from bungling only through the influence of a good woman. Many of his later indictments of human cupidity were, he thought, so severe that they could not be published for years. But when some appeared in Letters from the Earththey seemed hardly more bitter than what had appeared before.

In Mark Twain began to dictate his autobiography to Albert B. Twain acknowledged that he had originally sympathized with the more moderate Girondins of the French Revolution and then shifted his sympathies to the more radical Sansculottesindeed identifying himself as "a Marat " and writing that the Reign of Terror paled in comparison to the older terrors that preceded it.

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute. Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves, even going so far as to say, " Lincoln 's Proclamation Twain was also a supporter of women's suffrageas evidenced by his " Votes for Women " speech, given in Helen Keller benefited from Twain's support as she pursued her college education and publishing despite her disabilities and financial limitations.

The two were friends for roughly 16 years. Through Twain's efforts, the Connecticut legislature voted a pension for Prudence Crandallsince Connecticut's official heroine, for her efforts towards the education of young African-American women in Connecticut. Twain also offered to purchase for her use her former house in Canterbury, home of the Canterbury Female Boarding Schoolbut she declined.

At 62, Twain wrote in his travelogue Following the Equator that in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by " whites " in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey"; his conclusion is that "there are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages".

Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile. Twain's earlier writings on American Indians reflected his view of essentialized racial difference. Twain wrote in "The Noble Red Man" in His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back.

To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. The scum of the earth! In the same tract, Twain advocates genocide, describing the "Noble Aborigine" as : "nothing but a poor filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses" [ ] This piece sought to undermine the sympathy felt on the "Atlantic seabord" for Native Americans.

There was seldom a sane one among them. Twain was a Republican for most of his life. However, inTwain publicly broke with his party and joined the Mugwumps to support the Democratic nominee, Grover Clevelandover the Republican nominee, James G. Blainewhom he considered a corrupt politician. In the early 20th century, Twain began decrying both Democrats and Republicans as "insane" and proposed, in his book Christian Sciencethat while each party recognized the other's insanity, only the Mugwumps that is, those who eschewed party loyalties in favor of voting for "the best man" could perceive the overall madness linking the two.

Twain was a Presbyterian. For example, Twain wrote, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so", and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian". Twain generally avoided publishing his most controversial [ ] opinions on religion in his lifetime, and they are known from essays and stories that were published later. In the essay Three Statements of the Eighties in the s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages, revelationsholy scriptures such as the Bible, Providenceor retribution in the afterlife.

Twain did state that "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works", but also that " the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws ", which determine "small matters", such as who dies in a pestilence. At other times, he conjectured sardonically that perhaps God had created the world with all its tortures for some purpose of His own, but was otherwise indifferent to humanity, which was too petty and insignificant to deserve His attention anyway.

InTwain criticized the actions of the missionary Dr. William Scott Ament — because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work that was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, including Letters from the Earthwhich was not published until his daughter Clara reversed her position in in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding.

Little Bessiea story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the collection Mark Twain's Fables of Man. Twain raised money to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada in Twain created a reverent portrayal of Joan of Arca subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing about. Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond.

Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final work Autobiography of Mark Twainthe publication of which started in Novemberyears after his death. In it, Twain said: [ ]. There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is — in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell.

Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled. Twain was a Freemason.

They also gave him a Book of Mormon. The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. Twain used different pen names before deciding on "Mark Twain". He signed humorous and imaginative sketches as "Josh" until Additionally, Twain used the pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.

Twain maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating water safe for the passage of boat, was a measure on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain. Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention.

In Life on the MississippiTwain wrote:. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre ; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands — a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

Twain's story about his pen name has been questioned by some, [ ] with the suggestion that "mark twain" refers to a running bar tab that Twain would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. Samuel Clemens himself responded to this suggestion by saying, "Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune.

He died in and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear. I was a cub pilot on the Mississippi River then, and one day I wrote a rude and crude satire which was leveled at Captain Isaiah Sellers, the oldest steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and the most respected, esteemed, and revered.

For many years he had occasionally written brief paragraphs concerning the river and the changes which it had undergone under his observation during fifty years, and had signed these paragraphs "Mark Twain" and published them in the St. Louis and New Orleans journals. In my satire I made rude game of his reminiscences. It was a shabby poor performance, but I didn't know it, and the pilots didn't know it.

The pilots thought it was brilliant. They were jealous of Sellers, because when the gray-heads among them pleased their vanity by detailing in the hearing of the younger craftsmen marvels which they had seen in the long ago on the river, Sellers was always likely to step in at the psychological moment and snuff them out with wonders of his own which made their small marvels look pale and sick.

However, I have told all about this in "Old Times on the Mississippi. That poor old Captain Sellers was deeply wounded. He had never been held up to ridicule before; he was sensitive, and he never got over the hurt which I had wantonly and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity. I was proud of my performance for a while, and considered it quite wonderful, but I have changed my opinion of it long ago.

Sellers never published another paragraph nor ever used his nom de guerre again. While Twain is often depicted wearing a white suit, modern representations suggesting that he wore them throughout his life are unfounded. Evidence suggests that Twain began wearing white samuels clemmens biography on the lecture circuit, after the death of his wife in However, there is also evidence showing Twain wearing a white suit before Inhe sent a photograph of himself in a white suit to year-old Edward W.

Boklater publisher of the Ladies Home Journalwith a handwritten dated note. The white suit did eventually become Twain's trademark, as illustrated in anecdotes about this eccentricity such as the time he wore a white summer suit to a Congressional hearing during the winter. In his autobiography, Twain writes of his early experiments with wearing white out-of-season: [ ].

Next after fine colors, I like plain white. One of my sorrows, when the summer ends, is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the shapeless and degrading black ones. It is mid-October now, and the weather is growing cold up here in the New Hampshire hills, but it will not succeed in freezing me out of these white garments, for here the neighbors are few, and it is only of crowds that I am afraid.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. American author and humorist — For other uses, see Mark Twain disambiguation. Writer humorist entrepreneur publisher lecturer. Adventure fiction speculative fiction travelogue opinion journalism literary criticism polemic essay autobiography correspondence oration.

Olivia Langdon. Love of science and technology. The report of my death was an exaggeration. Early journalism and travelogues. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. See also: Twain—Ament samuels clemmens biography controversy. Main article: Mark Twain in popular culture. Archived from the original on June 3, Retrieved October 28, The New York Times.

April 22, ISSN Archived from the original on August 28, Retrieved August 28, Faulkner at Nagano. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, Ltd. Chicago: World Book, Inc. The Guardian. ISBN X p. The Mark Twain Annual 6 : 51— JSTOR Archived from the original on October 31, Retrieved October 31, Hispanic Division, Library of Congress. Archived from the original on October 26, Retrieved October 26, The Untold History of the United States.

Library of Congress. His samuels clemmens biography about the war and the war in the Phillippines [ sic ] were published nationwide. PBS News Hour. Archived from the original on July 2, Retrieved July 2, Mark Twain Journal. Archived from the original on June 5, Retrieved June 4, Archived from the original on December 9, Inventing Mark Twain.

William Morrow. ISBN Archived from the original on January 19, The Singular Mark Twain. Archived from the original on March 2, Retrieved October 11, Ed Egge. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, Volume Archived from the original on April 19, Retrieved April 16, Genealogy Volume 1—2; a weekly journal of American ancestry. Mark Twain: A Life.

Free Press. Archived from the original on February 10, Retrieved August 17, Archived from the original on June 4, Archived from the original on October 29, Retrieved October 25, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Archived from the original on October 28, Retrieved November 11, State Historical Society of Missouri. Archived from the original on September 23, Retrieved October 29, Life on the Mississippipp.

Archived from the original on August 17, Archived from the original on June 23, Retrieved September 10, Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1. University of California Press. Penguin Press. Military Times. Retrieved November 10, The Hannibal Courier-Post. Archived from the original on November 20, Retrieved November 25, Roughing Itp. ISBN X.

The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. Utah Division of State History. Archived from the original on November 7, Retrieved November 7, Archived from the original on August 13, Retrieved January 3, Remarking on the incident later in life he said, "I have spent the last 50 years trying to regret it. He went to work as an apprentice typesetter with the Missouri Courier and for his brother Orion who owned his own newspaper, the Hannibal Journal.

Louis, and Cincinnati. He wrote humorous articles and newspaper sketches to fill copy space. At the age of 22, Clemens returned to Missouri and worked as a riverboat pilot until trade was interrupted by the American Civil War in He once remarked that riverboat piloting was the best time in his life. Life on the Mississippi, written inreflects an era when river experiences, simple and carefree, were central to his life.

Missouri, although a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, declined to join the Confederacy and remained loyal to the Union. A legendary, if not quite infamous, anecdote tells of Clemens and his friends forming a Confederate militia that disbanded after two weeks, and which he wrote about later in "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.

On the way, they visited a Mormon community in Salt Lake City. Clemens' experiences in the West contributed significantly to his formation as a writer, and became the basis of his second book, Roughing Ita richly detailed portrait of life on the American frontier. Once in Nevada, Clemens became a miner, hoping to strike it rich discovering silver in the Comstock Lode.

After failing as a miner, Clemens obtained work at a newspaper called the Daily Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. It was there he first adopted the pen name "Mark Twain" on February 3,when he signed a humorous travel account with his new name. In those days authors often chose pen names that were in marked contrast to their own personality.

This certainly seemed the case with Samuel Clemens, the person, bound by more traditional conventions, while Mark Twain, the writer, was ever mocking the status quo and societal norms of the day. The contradiction between the private man, Sam Clemens, and the public persona of Mark Twain had begun. His lifelong friend, and literary adviser, William Dean Howells then editor of the Atlantic Monthly and later an author in his own right would always call him "Clemens.

Throughout his life he would often chafe at being described in the press as a humorist, a "funny man" as he called it, when, in fact, he aspired to much more as a writer. His next adventure was landing an assignment as a San Francisco correspondent for the Sacramento Union, writing from the Hawaiian islands, then known as the " Sandwich Islands.

He was soon in demand as a speaker at honorary dinners and banquets, something that would become a lifelong calling for him. The pen name "Mark Twain" was rapidly becoming a household word. His next assignment was once again that of a traveling correspondent, this time for the Alta California newspaper. His letters from this trip later became the basis for the book The Innocents Abroad —considered the most popular travel book ever written.

In it he pokes fun at tourists, the "innocents abroad," and their tendency to be at the mercy of their travel guide—and their prejudices—when encountering new situations. The Gilded Agewritten collaboratively with Charles Dudley was similarly a satirical treatise on American culture at the turn of the century. Twain was now a best-selling author and lecturer; tired of his itinerant lifestyle, he was ready to settle down.

He said to his friend from the Quaker City cruise, Mary Fairbanks "I am going to settle down someday even if I have to do it in a cemetery. Late in life, Twain would comment, "From that day to this she has never been out of my mind. Livy's wealthy father helped the young couple to establish residence in Buffalo, New York, where Twain, with his father-in-law's backing, became part owner of the Buffalo Express newspaper.

However, tragedy ensued when their first born son, sickly and premature, died at three months of age. They built a 19 room house at "Nook Farm" and the birth of their two daughters soon followed; Susy, inand Clara in Sam Clemens had come a long way from his early beginnings, living in a two room house and acquiring only a grade school education.

Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization. In Februaryhe improved his social status by marrying year-old Olivia Livy Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life.

Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published inand soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature. Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the publication of The Prince and the Paupera charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

In he put out Life on the Mississippian interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published inLivy gave it a chilly reception. After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. Inhe triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S.

Grantwho had just died. He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt. Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind.

They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God. Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood. His next major work, inwas The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilsona 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.