Mark Twain
(1835–1910)

Mark Twain was an American original and a man of his time. He wrote about an America of pioneers and adventurers. Most famously, he turned his memories of Mississippi River life from his youth into classics of American fiction. Despite his rural background, Twain was a creation of the new print media. He became its star–the most famous American author. An unmatched humorist, he had an ear finely tuned to American vernacular. His greatest literary creation in this genre was Huck Finn, a character who, like his creator, was a lot smarter than he let on.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, along the banks of the Mississippi River. He started working in a printing shop at age eleven, following his father's death. Young Sam yearned for travel and movement. His early twenties were spent as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. Soon after, he became a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. At this time, Clemens assumed the pen name "Mark Twain." It was as Mark Twain that the author traveled to Hawaii, Europe, and Palestine, gathering material on tourists and travel experiences that he would later use in sketches, stories, and lectures given across the U.S.

The name "Mark Twain" comes from the navigational phrase "Mark–the Twain," meaning "two fathoms deep" of Mississippi River water. The phrase refers back to the riverboat life of Samuel Clemens's youth. The short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," published in newspapers nationwide in 1865, made Mark Twain a sensation. When Twain married heiress Olivia Hangdon in 1870 and moved to a mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, he, like many of his characters, had become the very picture of American boom-time success.

In 1876, Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel that followed the trials and tribulations of a mischievous Southern youth. In 1884, Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which expanded these themes with even more success. Huckleberry Finn is widely considered Twain's greatest work. In the novel, he drew further on his memories of life on the Mississippi River to create a lively yet dangerous world. Twain's greatest achievement lies in the creation of the novel's unique narrator–the uneducated youth, Huck Finn. Huck has run away from home with the escaped slave Jim, and the two of them steer a raft down the Mississippi. In portraying Huck's friendship with Jim, Twain shows that Huck's healthy innocence will not allow him to accept prejudiced views. Known for its authentic portrayal of regional speech as well as for its humorous depiction of a world full of danger and violence, Huckleberry Finn has permanently influenced the development of the American novel form. Ernest Hemingway called it the book with the most influence on modern American literature.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The novel is a kind of travel dream. The setting is no actual site on a map, but a mythical place in the past–King Arthur's England in the sixth century. Like much of Twain's writing, A Connecticut Yankee affirms the American democratic ideals of individualism and freedom of opportunity. In this novel, Twain criticizes the institutions of chivalry and aristocracy that permeated European society.

Twain's last years were unhappy ones. His wife and three of his four children had died. From Pudden'head Wilson (1894) on, his writings assume a darker worldview. Twain took to arguing that human motivation is fundamentally selfish and that all human conduct can be ascribed to this impulse. A Fable (1909) is an exception to this pessimistic view, exhibiting a playfulness rarely found in late Twain.

From 1895 to 1900, Twain lectured all over the world. When he returned to New York in 1900, he was greeted as a hero. He spent his last years as an oft-recognized public figure, typically clad in a white suit, known by his familiar shock of white hair and bushy moustache. In 1908, Twain moved to a small farm in Redding, Connecticut, where he died in 1910.

Mark Twain was a creation of the newspaper age. No previous major American author had a comparable apprenticeship in the print media. Newspapers assumed their modern traits during Twain's lifetime. They became more popular in their appeal. A trend towards selling newspapers for one cent a copy led to big increases in circulation during the 1830s and 1840s.

Many writers, especially Europeans like Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold, criticized the sensationalist and superficial aspects of the American newspapers. Others defended them as the right medium for the expression of the American democratic spirit.

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