Critical Biography of Mark Twain: Life, Works, and Legacy

Introduction: America's Greatest Humorist

Samuel Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, is considered one of America's greatest humorists and writers. He is perhaps best known for his novels about boyhood life on the Mississippi River in the mid-19th century. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered Twain's greatest contribution to American literature, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, both of which were based in part on his childhood adventures along the banks of the Mississippi. Using the pen name Mark Twain, Clemens published more than thirty works of literature that included satire, historical fiction, short stories, and nonfiction. Quite a few of his books — including Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — have gone on to become classics (Literature 1835–1910, n.d.).

Early Life and Education

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born as the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the small town of Florida, Missouri. His parents had no idea that their son Samuel would one day be known as Mark Twain — one of America's most famous literary icons. About four years after he was born, the Clemens family moved thirty-five miles east to the town of Hannibal, a budding port city along the banks of the Mississippi River. Hannibal was a regular stop for steamboats coming from St. Louis and New Orleans (Mark Twain, n.d.).

Samuel's father worked as a judge. In 1844, he built a two-story frame house in which the family lived. When he was young, Samuel was often kept indoors because of poor health. At age nine, he recovered from his ailments and was allowed to join the rest of the town's children outside. He then began attending a private school in Hannibal. When Samuel was twelve, his father died from pneumonia. At thirteen, he left school to become a printer's apprentice. Two years later, he went to work for his brother Orion's newspaper as a printer and editorial assistant. It was through this work that young Samuel discovered his love of writing (Mark Twain, n.d.).

When he was seventeen, he left Hannibal to take a printer's job in St. Louis. While there, Clemens became a river pilot's trainee and earned his certification as a river pilot in 1858. His pseudonym, Mark Twain, came from his days as a river pilot. "Mark twain" is a river term meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet, used when announcing the depth of water for a boat — indicating that it is safe to navigate the river. When the Civil War brought river trade to a standstill in 1861, Clemens began working as a newspaper reporter for several papers across the United States. In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, and together they had four children. One child died in infancy and two others died in their twenties. Their last surviving daughter, Clara, lived to be eighty-eight and had one daughter of her own. Clara's daughter died before having any children, and so there are no direct descendants of Samuel Clemens living today (Mark Twain, n.d.).

Rise to Literary Fame

Twain began to achieve fame when his tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. His first book, The Innocents Abroad, was published in 1869, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. He wrote a total of twenty-eight books along with numerous short stories, letters, and sketches. Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910, but still has a devoted following today (Mark Twain, n.d.).

Although he has been gone for more than a century, reports of his death, in a figurative sense, continue to be embellished. Twain is thought of as very much alive today. He lives on in the ways that Americans manifest their cultural identity — in the things they think and the ways they tend to behave. No writer before or since has outlined the American national character more vividly than Twain. The years leading up to his death were not happy ones. His daughter Susy died fourteen years before he did, dealing him an emotional blow of inconceivable severity. Losing his favorite daughter — the one who wrote a book about him and who was the recipient of so much paternal love and hope — was devastating. Eight years after Susy died, Twain's wife Olivia passed away. She had been his partner in one of the great love stories in the history of American letters. A year before Twain himself died, his daughter Jean passed away after many years of battling mental illness. For a man who had invested so much loyalty and love in the women who made up his domestic life, the brutality of those losses was almost unbearable (O'Neill, 2010).

Major Works and Their Cultural Impact

If one believes that artists and writers have played, and continue to play, major roles in shaping the American imagination, it can surely be said that one of the most important influences is that of Mark Twain. In addition to attaining enduring popularity and becoming part of the American literary canon, Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been the subjects of widespread discussion across many fields of study, including political philosophy. Twain often saw the romantic imagination as failing to move humanity toward truth. Various literary scholars have proposed that his literary opinions were tied to realism, founded on an embedded hostility toward romantic literature. Twain is characteristically classified as a member of the loosely defined school of American Literary Realism, although in recent years certain scholars have questioned the suitability of this classification (Minzesheimer, 2005).

Born into a poor family in 1835, Samuel Clemens worked as a printer, steamboat captain, and prospector before reinventing himself as Mark Twain: lecturer, international travel writer, essayist, novelist, humorist, and political commentator. By current standards, he would no longer be considered a bestseller. Since USA Today's Best-Selling Books list began in 1993, Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn has never ranked higher than number 262. Even so, he remains one of America's most influential writers (Minzesheimer, 2005).

The young narrator Huck Finn — an outsider whose speech reveals his origins and who is trying to find his way in a world full of liars and hypocrites — is considered the prototype for J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Twain is still widely read, not just in the United States but around the world. Hundreds of editions of his writings remain in print, and new ones continue to appear. He is considered America's most iconic writer. Twain was fond of illustrations in his books, but the most memorable icon associated with him is the man himself — remembered for his shaggy hair and ever-present cigar. He was known to have smoked some three hundred cigars a month (Minzesheimer, 2005).

Huck Finn is the story of a boy willing to risk his soul for the fugitive slave Jim, believing his act of conscience to be a criminal one. Twain used humor to approach serious subjects such as slavery, revealing not only its moral insincerity but also the absurdity of churchgoing people who rationalized it. Huck's frequent use of a racial slur — 214 times by one count — has prompted parents and educators to question its appropriateness in classrooms and libraries. The American Library Association has noted that Huckleberry Finn was the fourteenth most challenged book in the past decade. Prominent defenders of the novel include Black writers such as Toni Morrison, who has written that repeated attempts to remove it from classrooms extend Jim's captivity into each new generation of readers. Twain moved to Hartford in 1871 to be closer to his publisher and lived there for most of the next twenty-five years. It was during this period that he wrote Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Minzesheimer, 2005).

Using money that his wife had inherited, Twain built a mansion across the street from the more modest home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twain's home reflects the many-sided complexity of the man and the writer. He had his dining room fireplace built with a divided flue and a window that allowed him to bask in the warmth of a roaring fire while watching snowflakes fall outside. Beneath the cool, comic surface of the work he produced there, one finds intense and fiery disapproval of the society around him. The house was the family's home until 1896, when Twain, his wife, and two of his three daughters were in Europe and his daughter Susy contracted meningitis and died at home. She was twenty-four years old, and Twain never lived in the house again (Literature 1835–1910, n.d.).

Works Cited

Byrne, William F. Realism, Romanticism, and Politics in Mark Twain. Highbeam, 2010.

Literature, 1835–1910. U.S. History, n.d.

Mark Twain. CMG Worldwide, n.d.

Minzesheimer, Bob. "100 Years Later Twain's Work Still Influences Writers While Charming Readers." USA Today, 20 April 2010.

O'Neill, Jaime. "Why Mark Twain Still Matters." Chico News & Review, 2010.