His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens; "the father of American literature" (as American author William Faulkner later called him) was born on 30th November 1835 in Florida (Missouri) and died in 1910. He is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (amongst other works), but he was also a journalist and a lecturer. As many of his writings were mainly humoristic and some of them dealt with boyhood, he was wrongly considered – also during his life and his great disappointment – as writer for kids. However he became one of the best known writers in the United States and even Hemigway said that Huckleberry Finn marks the very beginning of the American novel.

His family was a cultivated one and his father was a Tennessee country merchant, (John Marshall Clemens), at various times an attorney, a justice of the peace, a farmer, a storekeeper and a land investor: Mark Twain grew up in an environment which was sympathetic to learning. Mark was the sixth of seven children. He had three older brothers and two older sisters, but only two of these survived childhood, his brother Orion Clemens and sister Pamela. When he was four, his family moved to Hannibal, a little port town on the Mississippi ("The Big River"), which would ser ve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in his most famous novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Hannibal fulled his adolescence with the excitement of steamboats coming and going on the river, of the drunken quarrels and murders, of lynchings, of assisting a runaway slave and of close friendships with the son of the town itself. At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union and young Twain was familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing. His friendship with th black slaves of his boyhood led him to reject the institution of slavery, even if in the areas in which he lived he did not see slavery at its worst.

When Twain was about twelve, his father died of pneumonia and from that moment on he received a meare education: maybe in the rough environment of the Mississippi bankside he acquired a more valuable education than any he received at school. Immediately after his father’s death, he became a printer's apprentice and in 1851 began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for "the Hannibal Journal", a newspaper owned by his older brother, Orion. At eighteen, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.

At 22 years old, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, a steamboat pilot, (called Horace Bixby), convinced Twain to "learn the river" and to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot. Because of steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no lamps were allowed and night travel were very dangerous. A steamboat pilot needed a very wide knowledge of the ever-changing river and Twain meticulously studied 2000 miles of the Mississippi for more than two years until he finally received his steamboat pilot license. While training for his pilot's license, Twain convinced his younger brother Henry Clemens to work with him as a clerk on the Mississippi. Tragically, Henry was killed an account of an explosion of the steamboat he was working on, near Memphis. Twain was guilt stricken over his brother's death and held himself responsible for it for the rest of his life. Despite of that, Twain continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was finally interrupted.

The state in which Twain spent most of his youth, 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. So when the war began, Twain and some of his friends formed a Confederate militia (an experience he depicted in his 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), and got involved in a battle where a man was killed. Shocked by the experience, deserted. His friends joined the Confederate Army; Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, and went westward where he worked as a prospector, as a labourer in a quartz mill, and as a journalist.

Together with his brother, Twain travelled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. On the way, they happened to visit the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. His' experiences in the West contributed to his formation as a writer, and became the basis of his book Roughing It, as well as provided material for one of his earliest books, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County , a book which reported the peculiar ways of speaking of the frontiersmen he had known.

After his experience as a miner, Twain got a job at a Virginia City newspaper called the Territorial: it was here where he first adopted the pen name "Mark Twain". Specifically, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music " with this new name. However Clemens used different pen names before deciding on Mark Twain. As a matter of fact he had signed humorous and imaginative sketches "Josh" until 1863. "Mark Twain" came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms (12 ft, approximately 3.7 m) or "safe water" was measured on the sounding line. The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain" ("twain" is an archaic term for two). "By the mark twain" meant "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two fathoms", and so signifying "safe water".

Later he travelled to San Francisco, California, where he continued his work as a journalist and began his career as a lecturer. His work as a journalist introduced him to other American writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. During his time in San Francisco, Twain was given an assignment in Hawaii, the articles from this assignment became the basis for his first lectures. In 1867, a local newspaper supplied him with the money necessary to board a steamboat, with a party of individuals, bound for the Mediterranean.

Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travel experiences for the local newspaper, Alta California. Soon he became a travelling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus and he could report all his experiences with his burlesque humor.

On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser "Quaker City" for five months, which would be the foundation of his travel companion The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress . He said: "This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition it would have about it the gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea – other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need." During this tour of Europe and the Middle East he met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia. Twain claims to have fallen in love at first sight and in 1868, Twain met her. The became engaged and married two years later, in Elmira, New York. They had a son, Langdon, who died of diphtheria after 19 months. Later Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy, Clara, and Jean.

In 1872, Twain published a second work of travel literature, Roughing It, that can be considered as as a semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. It ridiculed American and Western society in the same way that Innocents did with the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , was not a travelbook because it was his first attempt at writing a novel and was written with his neighbour Charles Dudley Warner.

For his next two works, Twain would again draw from his past experiences, in particular those the Mississippi River: Old Times on the Mississippi, (a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875) Life on the Mississippi .

Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . This work drew on Twain's youth in Hannibal. Tom Sawyer, the main character, was a concoction of Twain as a child along with other school mates, sometimes exaggerated, into one of the loveliest characters in American literature. The novel also introduced Huckleberry Finn, here only a supporting character, but later the main protagonist of the most famous novel.

The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s first attempt at pure fiction, was not as well received. While writing it, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and started and completed another travel book A Tramp Abroad in which he reports his travels through central and southern Europe.

Without any doubt, it was with Huckleberry Finn that Twain was acknowledged as a great American novelist. The novel, written to be an offshoot from Tom Sawyer , proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. Huckleberry Finn (or "Huck" as he is called in the novel) is a young boy who firmly believes in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. The plot takes place in the 1850’s, when slavery is still present and Huck’s blind eye toward the rules of the age to follow what he thinks is just makes this book a standard read for children in the United States (and not only), to his author’s disappointment who did not mean to write it for that.

Near the end of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi , which recounts Twain’s memories and new experiences after a 22 year absence from the Mississippi. This is the book in which Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.

After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavours also in order to face the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing projects. So he focused on the writing of President Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs, finding time in between to write The Private History of a Campaign That Failed for "The Century Magazine".

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was his following work which was his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. The tone was deeply cynical to the point of almost being a rant against the established political system of the day (which would have been in King Arthur’s time), and eventually devolved into madness for the main character.

Maybe this work marked the beginning of his end as he fell into financial trouble which affected his humour vein. Twain had begun to write articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his business intentions afloat, but all that work was not enough to avoind his bankruptcy in 1894. He also started an activity of lecturer and was issued a Doctorate in Literature by Oxford University.

His next work, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson brought about Twain’s sense of irony, though it has been misunderstood. Maybe there were parallels between this book and Twain’s financial failings, in particular in his desire to escape his current constraints and become a different person. Although Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, he squandered much of it through bad investments, mostly through new inventions, and finally, his publishing house that, while enjoying initial success by selling Twain’s memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant , went bankrupt soon after.

Twain made a second tour of Europe recorded in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. He returned to America in 1900, having paid off his debts to his old firm. The Clemens' happy marriage lasted for 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904. Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc and was dedicated it to his wife. Twain said that this was the work he was most proud of in spite of the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream of Twain’s for a very long time and he eventually thought it to be the work to save his publishing company.

In 1906 he began his last work, his autobiography in "the North American Review" , which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining even if in it he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. For this reason some archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, unfortunately eliminating some of Twain’s humour and the flow of the book. His depression, which had started in 1896 on receiving word that his favourite daughter, Susy, had died of meningitis, was even deepened by the loss of a second daughter, Jean, in 1909.

In the same year he said: <<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 died of heart attack on 21st April 1910 in Redding, Connecticut and he is buried in his wife's family plot in Elmira, New York.

edited by Isabella Marinaro

  torna a Twain