Mark twain transferred copyrights to his wife to escape creditors, Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), the author of two of the most popular novels of American literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1976) and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), with the latter being regarded as “the Great American Novel”. William Faulkner eulogized him as “the father of American Literature” and till date he remains the most celebrated “American humorist of his age”.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the prosperous household of Florida, Missouri to John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847), an attorney and a grocery store owner, and his wife Jane in November 30, 1835. He was sixth of the seven siblings and last of three surviving children born to the Clemens. As a child, young Samuel grew up in a small port town called Hannibal near the Mississippi river which latter inspired him to create the fictional town of St. Petersburg in his two most popular works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that time Missouri was still a slave state and the Clemens themselves hailing from landowning aristocracy, owned several slaves. Thus the author witnessed the discrimination and racial violence attached to the institution of slavery from a very close angle, a theme which he best explored in his most acknowledged classic, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
With the death of his father in 1847 from pneumonia, dire financial crisis drove printer’s Twain to work as a apprentice at an early age of twelve. In 1851, he started assisting his brother Orion in their local newspaper, the Hannibal Journal, as a typesetter and humorist. At the age of eighteen, Twain left for New York City and worked as a printer in Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati. During this period, Twain regularly visited public libraries in the evening hours and taught himself more than any school education can provide him. A voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi river inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot for some years, a profession that was to supply him with much material for his future writings. It was also here that he assumed his pen name, Mark Twain, which in nautical language means ‘the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms or 12 feet’. The two fathom depth is the dividing line between safe and dangerous shallow water for steamboats. His career as a steamboat pilot was quite rewarding as it not only paid him well but also acquainted him with different kinds of people, cultures and lives that got reflected in his future writings. During one such voyage in June 21, 1858, Twain lost his younger brother Henry in a motorboat explosion, an incident that Twain claims to have foreseen in a dream a month ago. The accident left the author guilt stricken for the rest of his life and also developed his deep interest in parapsychology. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Twain left his job as a pilot to enroll himself as a Confederate militia but soon again left this career for writing and journalism and moved to Neveda to work with his brother Orion.
Samuel L. Clemens, now under the pseudonym of Mark Twain started publishing his stories and gained the first widespread recognition for his story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. During this time, Twain also travelled extensively to Europe, Mediterranean and the Middle East and on one such trip he met his future brother-in-law Charles Langdon who showed a photograph of Olivia to Twain. After a courtship through letters the couple eventually married in 1970 after which Twain shifted to Hartford, Connecticut for the rest of his life. In between, Twain was also offered an honorary membership ‘in the secret society Scroll and Key’ of Yale University (1868). Through his marriage to Olivia he also got to meet many luminaries of his age- socialists like William Dean Howells, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and many woman rights activists like Harriet Beecher Stowe. His sparkling wit and humor soon made him popular in this circle and it was also during this time that he penned all his major novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), all of which brought Twain fame and recognition as the most prolific and humorist writer of his age.
