Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),
[1] known by his
pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer,
humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced",
[2] and
William Faulknercalled him "the father of
American literature".
[3] His novels include
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
[4] the latter often called "
The Great American Novel".
Twain was raised in
Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for
Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother
Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the
Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
[5] His humorous story, "
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was published in 1865, based on a story that he heard at
Angels Hotel in
Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention and was even translated into French.
[6] His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, but he invested in ventures that lost most of it—such as the
Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter that failed because of its complexity and imprecision. He filed for
bankruptcy in the wake of these financial setbacks, but he eventually overcame his financial troubles with the help of
Henry Huttleston Rogers. He eventually paid all his creditors in full, even though his bankruptcy relieved him of having to do so.
Twain was born shortly after an appearance of
Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well; he died the day after the comet returned.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in
Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children born to Jane (
née Lampton; 1803–1890), a native of
Kentucky, and
John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), a native of
Virginia. His parents met when his father moved to
Missouri, and they were married in 1823.
[7][8] Twain was of
Cornish,
English, and
Scots-Irish descent.
[9][10][11][12] Only three of his siblings survived childhood:
Orion (1825–1897), Henry (1838–1858), and Pamela (1827–1904). His sister Margaret (1830–1839) died when Twain was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832–1842) died three years later. His brother Pleasant Hannibal (1828) died at three weeks of age.
[13][14]When he was four, Twain's family moved to
Hannibal, Missouri,
[15] a port town on the
Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
[16] Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. His father was an attorney and judge, who died of
pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11.
[17] The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice.
[1] In 1851, he began working as a
typesetter, contributing articles and humorous sketches to the
Hannibal Journal, a newspaper that Orion owned. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in
New York City,
Philadelphia,
St. Louis, and
Cincinnati, joining the newly formed
International Typographical Union, the printers
trade union. He
educated himself in
public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
[18]Twain describes his boyhood in
Life on the Mississippi, stating that "there was but one permanent ambition" among his comrades: to be a steamboatman.
Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary – from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.
As Twain describes it, the pilot's prestige exceeded that of the captain. The pilot had to:
...get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, must... actually know where these things are in the dark
Steamboat pilot
Horace E. Bixby took Twain on as a cub pilot to teach him the river between
New Orleans and St. Louis for $500 (equivalent to $14,000 in 2018), payable out of Twain's first wages after graduating. Twain studied the Mississippi, learning its landmarks, how to navigate its currents effectively, and how to read the river and its constantly shifting channels, reefs, submerged snags, and rocks that would "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated".
[19] It was more than two years before he received his pilot's license. Piloting also gave him his pen name from "
mark twain", the leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms (12 feet), which was safe water for a steamboat.
[20][21] As a young pilot, Clemens served on the steamer
A. B. Chambers with
Grant Marsh, who became famous for his exploits as a steamboat captain on the Missouri River. The two liked each other, and admired one another, and maintained a correspondence for many years after Clemens left the river.
[22]While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him, and even arranged a post of
mud clerk for him on the steamboat
Pennsylvania. On June 13, 1858, the steamboat's boiler exploded; Henry succumbed to his wounds on June 21. Twain claimed to have foreseen this death in a dream a month earlier,
[23]:275 which inspired his interest in
parapsychology; he was an early member of the
Society for Psychical Research.
[24] Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the
Civil War broke out in 1861, when
traffic was curtailed along the Mississippi River. At the start of hostilities, he enlisted briefly in a local
Confederateunit. He later wrote the sketch "
The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", describing how he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding.
[25]Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of
Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a
miner on the
Comstock Lode.
[25] He failed as a miner and went to work at the Virginia City newspaper
Territorial Enterprise,
[28] working under a friend, the writer
Dan DeQuille. He first used his pen name here on February 3, 1863, when he wrote a humorous travel account entitled "Letter From Carson – re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" and signed it "Mark Twain".
[29][30]His experiences in the
American West inspired
Roughing It, written during 1870–71 and published in 1872. His experiences in Angels Camp (in Calaveras County, California) provided material for "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865).
His first success as a writer came when his humorous
tall tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published on November 18, 1865, in the New York weekly
The Saturday Press, bringing him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the
Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the
Sacramento Union. His letters to the
Union were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.
[32]Upon returning to the United States, Twain was offered honorary membership in
Yale University's secret society
Scroll and Key in 1868.
[34] Its devotion to "fellowship, moral and literary self-improvement, and charity" suited him well.
Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he lost a great deal through investments. He invested mostly in new inventions and technology, particularly the
Paige typesetting machine. It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but it was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent $300,000 (equal to $9,000,000 in inflation-adjusted terms
[43]) on it between 1880 and 1894,
[44] but before it could be perfected it was rendered obsolete by the
Linotype. He lost the bulk of his book profits, as well as a substantial portion of his wife's inheritance.
[45]Twain and his family closed down their expensive Hartford home in response to the dwindling income and moved to Europe in June 1891.
William M. Laffan of
The New York Sun and the
McClure Newspaper Syndicate offered him the publication of a series of six European letters. Twain, Olivia, and their daughter Susy were all faced with health problems, and they believed that it would be of benefit to visit European baths.
[46]:175 The family stayed mainly in France, Germany, and Italy until May 1895, with longer spells at
Berlin (winter 1891/92),
Florence (fall and winter 1892/93), and Paris (winters and springs 1893/94 and 1894/95). During that period, Twain returned four times to New York due to his enduring business troubles. He took "a cheap room" in September 1893 at $1.50 per day (equivalent to $42 in 2018) at
The Players Club, which he had to keep until March 1894; meanwhile, he became "the Belle of New York," in the words of biographer
Albert Bigelow Paine.
[46]:176–190Twain's writings and lectures enabled him to recover financially, combined with the help of his friend,
Henry Huttleston Rogers.
[47] He began a friendship with the financier in 1893, a principal of
Standard Oil, that lasted the remainder of his life. Rogers first made him file for bankruptcy in April 1894, then had him transfer the copyrights on his written works to his wife to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all his creditors were paid.
[46]:188Twain accepted an offer from
Robert Sparrow Smythe[48] and embarked on a year-long, around the world lecture tour in July 1895
[49] to pay off his creditors in full, although he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so.
[50] It was a long, arduous journey and he was sick much of the time, mostly from a cold and a
carbuncle. The first part of the itinerary took him across northern America to
British Columbia, Canada, until the second half of August. For the second part, he sailed across the Pacific Ocean. His scheduled lecture in
Honolulu, Hawaii had to be canceled due to a cholera epidemic.
[51][46]:188 Twain went on to
Fiji, Australia, New Zealand,
Sri Lanka, India,
Mauritius, and South Africa. His three months in India became the centerpiece of his 712-page book
Following the Equator. In the second half of July 1896, he sailed back to England, completing his circumnavigation of the world begun 14 months before.
[46]:188Twain and his family spent four more years in Europe, mainly in England and
Austria (October 1897 to May 1899), with longer spells in London and
Vienna. Clara had wished to study the piano under
Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna.
[46]:192–211 However, Jean's health did not benefit from consulting with specialists in Vienna, the "City of Doctors".
[52] The family moved to London in spring 1899, following a lead by
Poultney Bigelow who had a good experience being treated by Dr. Jonas Henrik Kellgren, a Swedish
osteopathic practitioner in
Belgravia. They were persuaded to spend the summer at Kellgren's
sanatorium by the lake in the
Swedish village of Sanna. Coming back in fall, they continued the treatment in London, until Twain was convinced by lengthy inquiries in America that similar osteopathic expertise was available there.
[53]In mid-1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor
Hugh Gilzean-Reid at
Dollis Hill House, located on the north side of London. Twain wrote that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world."
[54]He then returned to America in October 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts. In winter 1900/01, he became his country's most prominent
opponent of imperialism, raising the issue in his speeches, interviews, and writings. In January 1901, he began serving as vice-president of the
Anti-Imperialist League of New York.
[55]
... the report is greatly exaggerated.
— Twain's reaction to a report of his death[62]
Twain lived in his later years at 14 West 10th Street in
Manhattan.
[63] He passed through a period of deep depression which began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of
meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.
[1] On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the
North American Review.
[64] In April, he heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all that she owned in the
1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith,
George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session. He was resistant initially, but he eventually admitted that four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him.
[65]Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls whom he viewed as surrogate granddaughters called the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. He exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight".
[27]:28 In 1907, he met Dorothy Quick (aged 11) on a transatlantic crossing, beginning "a friendship that was to last until the very day of his death".
[66]Twain was born two weeks after
Halley's Comet's closest approach in 1835; he said in 1909:
[46]I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together".
Twain's prediction was accurate; he died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in
Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come … His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of
American literature.
Twain's funeral was at the
Brick Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, New York.
[69] He is buried in his wife's family plot at
Woodlawn Cemetery in
Elmira, New York. The Langdon family plot is marked by a 12-foot monument (two fathoms, or "mark twain") placed there by his surviving daughter Clara.
[70] There is also a smaller headstone. He expressed a preference for cremation (for example, in
Life on the Mississippi), but he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word.
Officials in Connecticut and New York estimated the value of Twain's estate at $471,000 ($13,000,000 today).
[71]
Twain was writing for the Virginia City newspaper the
Territorial Enterprise in 1863 when he met lawyer
Tom Fitch, editor of the competing newspaper
Virginia Daily Union and known as the "silver-tongued orator of the Pacific".
[73]:51 He credited Fitch with giving him his "first really profitable lesson" in writing. "When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier writings," Twain later commented, "my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard."
[74] In 1866, he presented his lecture on the Sandwich Islands to a crowd in Washoe City, Nevada.
[75] Afterwards, Fitch told him:
Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin – the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced.
[76]
It was in these days that Twain became a writer of the
Sagebrush School; he was known later as its most famous member.
[77] His first important work was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," published in the
New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. After a burst of popularity, the
Sacramento Union commissioned him to write letters about his travel experiences. The first journey that he took for this job was to ride the steamer
Ajax on its maiden voyage to the
Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). All the while, he was writing letters to the newspaper that were meant for publishing, chronicling his experiences with humor. These letters proved to be the genesis to his work with the San Francisco
Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the
Panama isthmus.
On June 8, 1867, he set sail on the pleasure cruiser
Quaker City for five months, and this trip resulted in
The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress. In 1872, he published his second piece of travel literature,
Roughing It, as an account of his journey from Missouri to Nevada, his subsequent life in the
American West, and his visit to Hawaii. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that
Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. His next work was
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, his
first attempt at writing a novel. The book, written with his neighbor
Charles Dudley Warner, is also his only collaboration.
At this time he also wrote "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" for
The Century Magazine. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a
Confederate militia during the
Civil War. He next focused on
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, written with the same historical fiction style as
The Prince and the Pauper.
A Connecticut Yankee showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of
King Arthur. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.
[citation needed]His next large-scale work was
Pudd'nhead Wilson, which he wrote rapidly, as he was desperately trying to stave off bankruptcy. From November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote 60,000 words for the novel.
[45] Critics
[who?] have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the novel's rough organization and constant disruption of the plot. This novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life, like
The Prince and the Pauper. It was first published serially in
Century Magazine and, when it was finally published in book form,
Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared as the main title; however, the "subtitles" make the entire title read:
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins.
[45]Twain's next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated to his wife. He had long said
[where?] that this was the work that he was most proud of, despite the criticism that he received for it. The book had been a dream of his since childhood, and he claimed that he had found a manuscript detailing the life of
Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent.
[45] This was another piece that he was convinced would save his publishing company. His financial adviser Henry Huttleston Rogers quashed that idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was published nonetheless.
[citation needed]To pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, Twain had begun to write articles and commentary furiously, with diminishing returns, but it was not enough. He filed for bankruptcy in 1894. During this time of dire financial straits, he published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. He famously derided
James Fenimore Cooper in his article detailing Cooper's "
Literary Offenses". He became an extremely outspoken critic of other authors and other critics; he suggested that, before praising Cooper's work,
Thomas Lounsbury,
Brander Matthews, and
Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it".
[82]George Eliot,
Jane Austen, and
Robert Louis Stevenson also fell under Twain's attack during this time period, beginning around 1890 and continuing until his death.
[83] He outlines what he considers to be "quality writing" in several letters and essays, in addition to providing a source for the "tooth and claw" style of literary criticism. He places emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism; he complains, for example, that Cooper's
Deerslayer purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings. Ironically, several of his own works were later criticized for lack of continuity (
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and organization (
Pudd'nhead Wilson).
Twain's wife died in 1904 while the couple were staying at the
Villa di Quarto in
Florence. After some time had passed he published some works that his wife, his
de facto editor and censor throughout her married life, had looked down upon.
The Mysterious Stranger is perhaps the best known, depicting various visits of
Satan to earth. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime. His manuscripts included three versions, written between 1897 and 1905: the so-called Hannibal, Eseldorf, and Print Shop versions. The resulting confusion led to extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original versions become available as Twain wrote them.
Twain's last work was
his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-chronological order. Some archivists and compilers have rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book. The first volume of the autobiography, over 736 pages, was published by the University of California in November 2010, 100 years after his death, as Twain wished.
[84][85] It soon became an unexpected best-seller,
[86] making Twain one of a very few authors publishing new best-selling volumes in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Before 1899, Twain was an ardent
imperialist. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the
Hawaiian Islands.
[90] He said the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought.
[91] In 1899, however, he reversed course. In the
New York Herald, October 16, 1900, Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the
Philippine–American War, to anti-imperialism:
I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ... Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the
American Constitutionafloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the
treaty of Paris [which ended the
Spanish–American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
[92][93]
During the
Boxer rebellion, Twain said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success."
[94]From 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the
American Anti-Imperialist League,
[95] which opposed the annexation of the
Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members".
[36] He wrote many
political pamphlets for the organization. The
Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the
Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred
Moros were killed.
[96] Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.
[95]Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In
Following the Equator, Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes".
[36] He was highly critical of
European imperialists, such as
Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the
British Empire, and
Leopold II, King of the
Belgians.
[36] King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging
political satire about his private colony, the
Congo Free State. Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing Christianity to
the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the movement forced
Brussels to call a halt.
[97][98]During the
Philippine–American War, Twain wrote a short
pacifist story titled
The War Prayer, which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of love are incompatible with the conduct of war. It was submitted to
Harper's Bazaar for publication, but on March 22, 1905, the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a
woman's magazine". Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend
Daniel Carter Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with
Harper & Brothers, Twain could not publish
The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until 1923. It was republished as campaigning material by
Vietnam War protesters.
[36]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
Sansculottes, indeed identifying himself as "a
Marat" and writing that the
Reign of Terror paled in comparison to the older terrors that preceded it.
[99] Twain supported the
revolutionaries in Russiaagainst the reformists, arguing that the
Tsar must be got rid of by violent means, because peaceful ones would not work.
[100] He summed up his views of revolutions in the following statement:
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.
[101]
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 ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also".
[102] He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying, "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature ... but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him".
[103] He paid for at least one black person to attend
Yale Law School and for another black person to attend a southern university to become a minister.
[104]Twain's sympathetic views on
race were not reflected in his early writings on
American Indians. Of them, Twain wrote in 1870:
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!
[105]
As counterpoint, Twain's essay on "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper" offers a much kinder view of Indians.
[82] "No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them."
[106] In his later travelogue
Following the Equator (1897), Twain observes 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".
[107] In an expression that captures his East Indian experiences, he wrote, "So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make
India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."
[108]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.
[110] Through Twain's efforts, the Connecticut legislature voted a pension for
Prudence Crandall, since 1995 Connecticut's official heroine, for her efforts towards the education of African-American young ladies in Connecticut. Twain also offered to purchase for her use her former house in Canterbury, home of the
Canterbury Female Boarding School, but she declined.
[111]:528
Twain was a
Presbyterian.
[114] He was critical of
organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. He wrote, for example, "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".
[115] With
anti-Catholic sentiment rampant in 19th century America, Twain noted he was "educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic".
[116] As an adult, he engaged in religious discussions and attended services, his theology developing as he wrestled with the deaths of loved ones and with his own mortality.
[117]Twain generally avoided publishing his most controversial
[118] 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 1880s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages,
revelations,
holy scriptures such as the Bible,
Providence, or retribution in the
afterlife. He 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.
[119] At other times, he wrote or spoke in ways that contradicted a strict deist view, for example, plainly professing a belief in Providence.
[120] In some later writings in the 1890s, he was less optimistic about the
goodness of God, observing that "if our Maker
is all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind". 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.
[121]In 1901, Twain criticized the actions of the
missionary Dr.
William Scott Ament (1851–1909) because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the
Boxer Uprising of 1900. Twain's response to hearing of Ament's methods was published in the
North American Review in February 1901:
To the Person Sitting in Darkness, and deals with examples of
imperialism in China, South Africa, and with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.
[122] A subsequent article, "To My Missionary Critics" published in
The North American Review in April 1901, unapologetically continues his attack, but with the focus shifted from Ament to his missionary superiors, the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
[123]After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work that was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, including
Letters from the Earth, which was not published until his daughter
Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to
Soviet propaganda about the withholding.
[124] The anti-religious
The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916.
Little Bessie, a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection
Mark Twain's Fables of Man.
[125]Twain created a reverent portrayal of
Joan of Arc, a subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing about.
[127] In 1900 and again in 1908 he stated, "I like
Joan of Arc best of all my books, it is the best".
[127][128]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."
[129]Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final work
Autobiography of Mark Twain, the publication of which started in November 2010, 100 years after his death. In it, he said:
[130]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.
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 1863. Additionally, he used the pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.
[138]He 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."
[139] The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "The water is 12 feet (3.7 m) deep and it is safe to pass."
Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In Life on the Mississippi, he wrote:
Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them "MARK TWAIN", and give them to the
New Orleans Picayune. 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.
[140]
Twain's story about his pen name has been questioned by some
[141] 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 1869 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."
[142]In his autobiography, Twain writes further of Captain Sellers' use of "Mark Twain":
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." The pilots handed my extravagant satire to a river reporter, and it was published in the New Orleans True Delta. 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.
[143]
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 suits on the lecture circuit, after the death of
his wife Olivia ("Livy") in 1904. However, there is also evidence showing him wearing a white suit before 1904. In 1882, he sent a photograph of himself in a white suit to 18-year-old
Edward W. Bok, later publisher of the
Ladies Home Journal, with a handwritten dated note. The white suit did eventually become his 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).
[45] McMasters'
The Mark Twain Encyclopedia states that Twain did not wear a white suit in his last three years, except at one banquet speech.
[144]