Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens — known to the world by his pen name Mark Twain — stands as the defining figure of American literature in the nineteenth century and one of the most influential writers in the English language. He was a humorist of genius, a novelist of the first rank, a social critic of extraordinary penetration, and a public personality whose fame reached every corner of the literate world. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and dozens of shorter works, Twain captured the American experience with a precision and comedy that have never been surpassed. He was, as William Faulkner famously declared, "the father of American literature."

Twain's achievement was not only literary but linguistic. He was the first major American writer to take seriously the vernacular speech of ordinary Americans — the drawling rhythms, the comic exaggeration, the bitter irony of the Mississippi Valley and the Far West — and to make that speech the vehicle of serious literary art. Before Twain, American literature looked primarily to England and to the polished forms of European tradition; after Twain, it was free to be itself. His influence on Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and virtually every American writer who followed him is impossible to overstate.

But Twain was more than a literary figure. He was a failed businessman, a bankrupt who rebuilt his fortune through sheer force of personality and a global lecture tour in his sixties. He was a public intellectual who turned his pen against imperialism, racism, religious hypocrisy, and the comfortable lies of Gilded Age America. He was a man of profound personal losses — the deaths of a son and two daughters and his beloved wife — who processed grief through work and dark comedy. And in his final years he became something more somber: a writer whose humor curdled into a magnificent pessimism about human nature, producing some of the most searching and unsparing critiques of civilization ever written in the American language.

Family and Early Years in Missouri

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the small village of Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children born to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens. He arrived two weeks premature, a sickly infant in a rough frontier settlement of perhaps one hundred people, and the odds against his survival seemed considerable. He would later observe, with characteristic irony, that he had come in with Halley's Comet in 1835 and predicted he would go out with it — a prediction that proved accurate: he died on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley's Comet reached its perihelion.

His father, John Clemens, was a Virginia-born lawyer and storekeeper of considerable intelligence and scant practical success — a man of legal training and ambitious temperament who struggled to make a living on the Missouri frontier. He purchased land in Tennessee that he believed would one day make the family's fortune; it never did, but the dream of the Tennessee land haunted the Clemens family for decades and appears in Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age, where it serves as a symbol of American optimism — grand, speculative, and ultimately futile.

When Samuel was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town on the Mississippi about one hundred miles north of St. Louis. Hannibal would become the most important place in Twain's imaginative geography — the model for the fictional St. Petersburg of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the site of his childhood memories and adult nostalgia, the place that shaped his vision of American life. The Mississippi River, which flowed past Hannibal's levees carrying the enormous traffic of the antebellum trade, was the central fact of the town's existence and the dominant image of Twain's literary imagination.