Mark Twain: A Life

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, a village of a hundred people that he later described as requiring no enlargement to become a cemetery. His father, John Marshall Clemens, was a Virginia-born lawyer and land speculator of relentless ambition and modest achievement, a man who owned a single enslaved person and spoke of Tennessee land holdings as though they were a coming fortune. They never were. His mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, was the opposite of her husband in almost every way that mattered: warm, funny, quick-eyed, the kind of woman who could tell a story and make you believe she had invented the art on the spot.

The family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, when Sam was four. Hannibal was a river town on the Mississippi, and the Mississippi was the fact that organized Sam Clemens's entire early life. It was loud and various and completely indifferent to human plans. Rafts and steamboats moved through it carrying cotton and pigs and ambitious young men. The town smelled of mud and commerce and occasional violence. Slavery was a visible daily reality. Sam saw a slave killed by a white man for a minor infraction and saw the killer go unpunished. He saw a dozen bodies pulled from the river. He saw a man burn to death in the jail. He filed all of it.

His father died when Sam was twelve, leaving the family poor and the Tennessee land still worthless. Sam left school and went to work as a printer's apprentice for his brother Orion's newspaper, setting type and occasionally writing small items that showed an early grasp of how to make a sentence do two things at once. He was restless from the beginning. He tried his hand at newspaper work in New York and Philadelphia and Cincinnati, always reading voraciously in the mechanics' libraries of each city, always watching people with the focused attention of someone who intends to use what he sees.

What he wanted, what every boy in a Mississippi river town wanted, was to be a steamboat pilot. It was the most glamorous and the highest-paid occupation on the American frontier. A good pilot earned more than the Vice President. In 1857, Sam found a way aboard a steamboat heading south and talked his way into a two-year apprenticeship under the Mississippi's most respected pilot, Horace Bixby. What Bixby taught him was not merely navigation but a kind of total environmental attention, a requirement to hold the entire river in mind at once, every snag and sandbar and depth change and current shift. It was, Sam would later understand, exactly the training a novelist needs.

The Civil War ended Sam Clemens's career as a river pilot before it had fully begun. The river commerce stopped; the boats stayed docked. He spent two weeks in a disorganized Confederate militia unit in the Missouri hills, retreating whenever rumors of Union forces reached them, and quit. He later wrote about this experience in a piece called "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," which managed to be both funny and genuinely ashamed without being dishonest about either. Then his brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory by Abraham Lincoln, and Sam went west with him to see what the silver boom looked like.

What it looked like was chaos, opportunity, and an almost unlimited tolerance for tall tales. Sam tried mining and failed at it. He discovered that he was not suited to any form of labor that required patience with physical reality. What he was suited to, as he had always quietly suspected, was talking. He got a job at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and became the best reporter in the territory within a year, partly because he had a talent for observation and partly because he had a talent for invention and saw no serious moral distinction between the two when a good story was at stake.

It was in Nevada that he first used the name Mark Twain, a Mississippi pilot's call meaning two fathoms of water, safe depth for a steamboat. He took the pen name to separate his journalism from his identity, and then discovered that the pen name was his identity in ways the given name never had been. He moved to San Francisco in 1864, fell in with the writers and journalists working out of that city, and in 1865 published "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in a New York paper. The story was reprinted across the country and read by people who had never read anything else he had written. Mark Twain, as a presence in American letters, had arrived.

He leveraged the jumping frog into a lecture tour and then a trip to the Sandwich Islands for a California newspaper. He discovered that he could hold an audience for an hour with nothing but a story and a pause and a deadpan expression. He had found the second form of his genius: he was a performer. His lectures sold out. He was famous in California before he was famous anywhere else, and he understood that fame, properly managed, was a form of capital.

In 1867, the Alta California newspaper paid Mark Twain to join a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, the first large American tourist excursion to the Old World. The resulting book, The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, became the best-selling American travel book of the nineteenth century and made Twain famous on the eastern seaboard, which was where fame that mattered was manufactured.

The Innocents Abroad worked because it was honest about the thing that American travel writing was designed to conceal: that most American tourists went to Europe not to be changed by it but to confirm what they already thought. Twain satirized the pilgrims in his party who wept before religious relics of questionable authenticity and haggled with Italian shopkeepers and called everything "quaint." He was not reverent about the Old Masters. He looked at things with his own eyes and reported what he saw, and what he saw was frequently that the famous thing was less impressive than advertised and the ordinary life around it was more interesting than anyone had bothered to mention.

In Hartford, Connecticut, where he had gone to negotiate the book's publication, he met Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy coal merchant from Elmira, New York. She was educated, refined, gentle, and in delicate health. She was also, for reasons that have puzzled biographers ever since, exactly the right person for Sam Clemens. He pursued her with the focused intensity he brought to everything he decided to want. They married in 1870. He called her Livy. She called him Youth. She read his manuscripts and crossed out the coarser passages, and he let her, or mostly let her, because he had enough sense to understand that the parts she wanted to remove were frequently the parts that would cost him readers in places he needed readers.

They built a house in Hartford that was one of the most photographed private residences in America. It had nineteen rooms, a billiard room that Twain used as his study, a conservatory, a covered porch that Twain compared to the deck of a steamboat. He was happy there in the way that restless men are sometimes happy: fully occupied, surrounded by people he loved, and still itching.

The decade of the 1870s and into the 1880s was the period of Twain's greatest sustained achievement. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared in 1876, a book ostensibly for children that adults immediately recognized as something more complicated. Tom is charming, manipulative, self-dramatizing, and fundamentally dishonest in the way that most children who survive childhood are fundamentally dishonest. The book is funny and moves fast and contains passages of genuine beauty about the Mississippi and about boyhood as a state of perpetual negotiation between what you want and what the adult world will permit.

The Prince and the Pauper followed in 1881, a medieval fantasy about identity and class and the arbitrariness of privilege. Then Life on the Mississippi in 1883, which combined a memoir of his piloting years with a return trip down the river that produced some of the finest travel writing in the English language. And then, in 1884, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Hemingway's claim that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn is not hyperbole. The book did several things simultaneously that had not been done before. It told a story from the perspective of a poor, uneducated, white boy in the antebellum South without either condescending to him or falsifying him. It made the moral horror of slavery visible not through argument but through the relationship between Huck and Jim, an enslaved man who is the book's true moral center. It used the American vernacular as a literary instrument, proved that the way ordinary Americans actually talked could carry the weight of great fiction. And it did all of this while being genuinely funny.

The book was condemned and banned immediately upon publication and has been condemned and banned in various ways ever since, which is approximately what happens to books that tell the truth about American life. Twain understood that he had written his masterpiece. He also understood, with the clear-eyed pragmatism that coexisted in him alongside everything else, that he would never quite reach that altitude again.

Twain was not merely a writer; he was an industry. He gave lectures that filled halls across America and England and Australia. He wrote for magazines and newspapers. He endorsed products. He was the first American writer to understand celebrity as a system and to work that system deliberately. When he wore his white suit in public in his later years, he was not dressing for comfort; he was maintaining a brand.

He was also, unfortunately, a disastrous businessman. He invested heavily in a typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige that was supposed to revolutionize the printing industry. The Paige Compositor was indeed a marvel of mechanical ingenuity and it never worked reliably enough to be manufactured. Twain sank approximately five million dollars in today's money into it over ten years and received nothing. He also owned a publishing company that he ran into bankruptcy. By 1894, at nearly sixty years old, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was insolvent.

He did what anyone else in his position would have done: he went on a world lecture tour to pay his debts. He was sixty when he set out in 1895, accompanied by Livy and their daughter Clara, to lecture in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, South Africa, and England. His collection of travel pieces from this journey, Following the Equator, is not his best book but it contains some of his sharpest observations, and the chapter on India in particular reads like the work of a man seeing a civilization of unimaginable complexity with fresh, unsentimental eyes.

He paid his debts in full. He did not have to. He could have sheltered behind bankruptcy law. He paid anyway, because he had been raised to believe that debts were debts, and because he was aware that his public persona depended on the public trusting him, and because he was, underneath the performance, a man of more principle than the performance sometimes suggested.

The last fifteen years of Twain's life were marked by a series of losses that broke something in him that had not previously been broken. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896 while he was in England, unable to reach her in time. Livy's health, always fragile, deteriorated steadily. His daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. And then in 1904 Livy died, and Twain, who had never been a man who concealed his emotions very successfully, entered a grief that had no bottom.

The work he produced in these years is startling and strange. The Mysterious Stranger, in various manuscript forms he could not finish, imagines an angel named Satan who demonstrates to a group of medieval boys that human life is a dream with no moral meaning, that God is indifferent or absent, that history is a nightmare from which there is no waking. What Is Man? argues mechanically and with bleak persistence that human beings have no free will and no genuine virtue, that everything they do is determined by selfishness and self-interest. Letters from the Earth presents Satan writing to the archangels Gabriel and Michael about the absurdity of the human conception of heaven.

He did not publish most of it. He was aware that his public wanted the genial white-suited sage and not the old man who had concluded that the universe was a cosmic joke at humanity's expense. He performed the sage when required and wrote the dark material and left instructions about what should be published after his death.

He died on April 21, 1910, one day after Halley's Comet reached its perihelion. He had been born two weeks after a previous apparition of the comet in 1835, and he had said he expected to go out with it. He was right. His last years had been marked by a clarity about human nature that was either wisdom or despair and was possibly both, and the distinction may not matter as much as the prose he left behind.

Charles Dickens and Mark Twain met in person only once, at a dinner in New York in 1867 while Dickens was on his second American reading tour. Twain had gone to see Dickens perform and wrote about it with characteristic frankness: the reading was extraordinary, Dickens was masterful, and the ticket prices were outrageous. What Twain admired about Dickens, and what connects the two men across the Atlantic, was the same thing: both understood that serious literature and popular entertainment were not in opposition, that the novelist who reached a million readers had not compromised anything that mattered.

The family connection through the Thomann line places Twain among ancestors who understood America as a practical place, a place where you worked with what you had and made the best story possible out of the materials available. The Mississippi River, the Nevada silver mines, the Hartford drawing room, the world lecture tour paying off debts: these are not the biography of a man of letters in the European tradition. They are the biography of an American, someone who understood that in this country the writer had to also be the entrepreneur and the performer and the public figure, and that this was not a compromise but was in fact the native condition of American literary life.

His influence is immeasurable precisely because it is invisible. American writers after Twain wrote in an American voice as a matter of course without recognizing that this was something Twain had made possible. Hemingway's short sentences, Salinger's colloquial intimacy, the vernacular of Southern fiction, the satirical tradition from H.L. Mencken through Kurt Vonnegut: all of it passes through Twain. He invented a way of telling the truth while appearing to be only telling a story, and that technique has never gone out of use.

The white suit is in the Smithsonian. The house in Hartford is a museum. The river is still there. None of these things are the legacy. The legacy is the sentence, the particular rhythm of the American sentence that says what it means without announcing that it is saying anything at all.

The challenge of reading Twain today is the same challenge it has always been: the humor is the delivery system for the content, and readers who are only watching for the jokes will miss what the jokes are about. He is funny. He is also, underneath the funny, a writer of relentless moral seriousness who spent fifty years examining what America claimed to be and what it actually was and finding the distance between those two things both comic and catastrophic.

Start with Huckleberry Finn, not Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer is excellent, but Huckleberry Finn is the book. Read it knowing that Twain revised it over seven years and set it aside and returned to it and was not sure until late in the process whether it was working. The raft sections in the middle of the book, where Huck and Jim float south at night and talk, are among the finest pages in American literature. The ending, which many readers find unsatisfying, was Twain's deliberate choice to show how deeply the culture had already corrupted the moral clarity that Huck had achieved on the river.

Then read Life on the Mississippi, which is autobiography disguised as travel writing. Then The Innocents Abroad to see the satirical mode at full stretch. Then, if you want to understand where the humor came from and where it ended, read What Is Man? and as much of Letters from the Earth as you can find. The man who wrote those books and the man who wrote Tom Sawyer are the same man, and understanding both of them together tells you more about what America has been and what it has refused to be than almost any other single body of work.

He is in the family tree. He is also in the American air. Every American writer who has ever tried to write honestly and entertainingly at the same time has been working in territory Mark Twain cleared, and the work of clearing it was a lifetime's work, and it remains unfinished, because that territory is inexhaustible.