mark twain president biography

• Skip to global NPS navigation
• Skip to the main content
• Skip to the footer section

Exiting nps.gov

How mark twain helped ulysses s. grant write his personal memoirs.

Wikimedia Commons

Rumors have persisted for many years that Ulysses S. Grant did not entirely write his own memoirs. In a February 2012 article for The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates explained the myth by stating that, “a lot of really intelligent people are under the impression that Grant’s lucid prose are really the result of Mark Twain’s editing hand . . . My sense is that people read Grant’s writing, hear about the association with Twain and assume that explains it.” However, the claim is untrue. The original hand-written manuscript still survives and is entirely penned with Grant’s own handwriting. Twain was not even involved with the project when he began writing. Grant had previously agreed to allow a publishing company to print the book but had not yet signed a final contract. Grant was writing articles about the many battles he had fought during the Civil War and hoped to expand on these articles and form a memoir of his military career. Under this original plan, The Century Company was willing to give Grant ten percent of all sales after the book was finished. When Twain heard about the offer, he was appalled by how little money Grant would get from the sales of the book. He believed he could offer Grant a better deal. Twain wasted little time making his way to New York City to convince Grant that he could give him a better deal. When Twain arrived at his home on 66 th Street, Grant and his eldest son, Frederick T. Grant, were reading over The Century Company’s contract that needed to be signed before publication. Grant was ready to pick up his pen and sign the contract when Twain asked if he could read it before any signature was made. Twain reviewed the contract and believed that the ten percent royalty being offered was too low and even exploitative. Twain tried to convince Grant that he could give him a better deal, which would provide Grant with more money. Grant was reluctant to back out of the contract that he and the publishers had negotiated. He believed it would be dishonorable to back out after giving his word. Twain tried to convince Grant that he should investigate a different publisher. For example, the American Publishing Company had published many of Twain’s books, and the company would be able to bring in more profit than The Century Company. Grant was still resistant to the advice when Fred suggested that the contract be set aside while they investigated the facts behind Twain’s advice. Grant felt loyalty towards the Century Company because of the work he had done with the company while writing his articles on the Civil War battles. Grant did agree, however, to listen to Fred, and the contract was set aside for twenty-four hours. Twain was not sure that setting the contract aside for a day would work. He thought Grant would not change his mind and remain with the Century Company. Twain told Grant that by selling the book through a subscription system, the book would produce thousands of dollars in sales. Door-to-door salesman (oftentimes Civil War veterans) would promote the book and get potential readers to place an order prior to publication. Twain himself was getting ready to sell The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through subscription sales. The thought of making thousands appealed to Grant. He knew that he would not benefit from the sales of the book because of his terminal throat cancer, but his family would need the money since Grant had lost nearly everything when he was recently swindled by a business partner. Grant decided to follow Twain’s advice. He offered Grant 70% of the profits made by the sales of the book. The book would be published through Charles Webster Publishing, a new publishing company managed by a nephew of Twain’s wife. Grant chose this option because he did not want to take money from Twain if the book flopped. If the book sold well, the sales would lift the Grant family out of debt. The sales would also help Twain, who was having financial issues of his own. Grant did not like turning down the offer from The Century Company, but reality told him that the money was needed for his family when he inevitably met his end. Twain worked by Grant’s side over the next several months as Grant wrote his now famous memoirs, providing literary advice as Grant wrote out each page. Twain also proof-read the pages as Grant worked tirelessly to finish the book before he passed away. The entire writing was nevertheless Grant’s words and thoughts. There is no way Twain could have known so many facts about the Mexican War and the Civil War, both of which heavily detailed in the memoirs. Rumors about the authorship of Grant’s memoirs began in 1885 before the book was even finished. They were started by Adam Badeau, one Grant’s former staff officers in the U.S. Army who assisted Grant during the early stages of writing the memoirs. Most notably, Badeau helped Grant with some of the details concerning the battles they had served in during the Civil War. Badeau had already written his own trilogy on Grant’s career, Military History of US Grant . Badeau, however, became disgruntled and felt like he was not getting the credit he deserved for the creation of the memoir. Badeau began spreading rumors that he was responsible for much of the writing of the memoirs and that he was hired as a ghost writer to help Grant. He also asked Grant for a pay increase. These rumors would eventually make their way into the newspapers. Colonel George P. Ihrie, who had served with Grant during the Mexican War, told reporters from The World that Grant was only providing the information for the memoirs, but that Adam Badeau was doing the writing. Grant woke up on the morning of April 29, 1885 to read that he was not the author of his own memoirs. Grant felt that a response was needed. He emphatically replied in a widely printed letter that the work on the memoirs was “entirely my own.” Grant relieved Badeau from his duties after the request for more money and the spreading of rumors. Badeau’s accusations opened the door for others to question the authorship of the memoirs. Many people had difficulty accepting the fact that Grant was an excellent writer. Since Twain assisted Grant with the memoirs, some believed Twain was the author. Grant passed away on the morning of July 23, 1885 just days after finishing his memoir. The book was sold in two volumes at that time through the subscription system proposed by Twain. Despite the rumors created by Adam Badeau, the book became an instant bestseller. Twain said that the book was one of the best written he had ever seen. Charles Webster Publishing wrote a check for $200,000 to give to Julia Dent Grant in early 1886. It was the biggest royalty check written up to that time. Grant’s Personal Memoirs are still in print today and are often considered one of the best written ever produced by a former president.

Further Reading

You might also like.

• ulysses s grant national historic site
• ulysses s grant
• literature poetry

Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site

Last updated: January 14, 2021

What can we help you find?

While we certainly appreciate historical preservation, it looks like your browser is a bit too historic to properly view whitehousehistory.org. — a browser upgrade should do the trick.

Main Content

Rubenstein Center Scholarship

An Author and a President

The Unlikely Friendship of Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain

• Lina Mann Historian

Two of the nineteenth century’s most prominent American men, Ulysses S. Grant and Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, developed an unlikely friendship extending from the White House to Grant’s deathbed. The steely, quiet demeanor of the former Union Army general contrasted sharply with the jocular nature of the celebrated author. Nevertheless, over the years a deep relationship blossomed, cementing a friendship for the ages.

In late November 1867, a young Mark Twain arrived in Washington, D.C., to serve as private secretary to William Stewart, a senator from Nevada. Twain had just returned from a tour of Europe and the Middle East aboard the former Union steamship, Quaker City . While his travels on the Quaker City would later be documented in the successful 1869 book, The Innocents Abroad , he was fairly unknown at the time he went to Washington. Twain later wrote in his autobiography, “I was not known then; I had not begun to bud--I was an obscurity…” 1

After moving into the Willard Hotel, just down the street from the White House, Twain spent a great deal of time at the Capitol observing the proceedings of the Fortieth Congress, meeting congressmen, making friends with correspondents, and writing for newspapers. 2 On November 25, he wrote home, “Am pretty well known now- intend to be better known. Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs for no good purpose.” 3

This photograph of Mark Twain was taken on May 20, 1907.

Show Me More

One of these “old Generals” happened to be Ulysses S. Grant. In a notebook chronicling Twain’s life from August through December 1867, he noted their first meeting, “Acquainted with Gen Grant-- said I was glad to see him--he said I had the advantage of him.” Although the details of this first meeting are few and far between, it is likely that Grant and Twain met through Senator Stewart. 4 It is unknown where this meeting took place, but their introduction laid the groundwork for a very important friendship that benefited both men later in life.

On January 19, 1868, Twain attempted to contact Grant but was unsuccessful, writing to his family, “I called at Gen. Grant’s house last night. He was out at a dinner party, but Mrs. Grant said she would keep him at home on Sunday evening.” 5 If this second meeting ever came to fruition, it is undocumented. Around the same time, Twain secured a book contract to write about his travels aboard the Quaker City and concluded his short stint as private secretary by early March. 6 Twain had grown weary of Washington, writing in a letter to his brother, “I am most infernally tired of Wash. & its ‘attractions.’” 7

Two years later on July 4, 1870, Mark Twain returned to Washington to lobby the passage of a Senate bill that would reorganize the Tennessee judicial system. 8 By this point, Twain had gained greater notoriety with the publication of The Innocents Abroad the previous year. After Twain observed congressional proceedings for several days, Senator Stewart brought him to the White House on July 8 to meet President Grant, now a year into his first term. The author described the encounter in a letter to his wife, Olivia, later that evening, “Called on the President in a quiet way this morning. I thought it would be the neat thing to show a little embarrassment when introduced, but something occurred to make me change my deportment to calm & dignified self-possession. It was this: The General was fearfully embarrassed himself!” 9

This nineteenth century oil on canvas portrait depicts President Ulysses S. Grant

What caused the president’s fearful embarrassment? Twain recounted the events of July 8 many years later in more detail: “I shook hands and then there was a pause and silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the General’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two, in silence, and then I said: ‘Mr. President, I am embar[r]assed-- are you?’ He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image and I got away under the smoke of my volley.” 10

Their meeting at the White House certainly left a deep impression on the president. Nearly ten years later, Twain agreed to speak at a Chicago reception given in Grant’s honor on November 13, 1879. The mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, introduced the two men. Upon introduction Grant paused, looked at Twain, and asked, “Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?” The tension broke and the two men laughed together. To Twain’s delight, Grant recalled their previous meeting and a friendship, twelve years in the making, was born. 11

Starting in the fall of 1880, Twain began to call often at Grant’s home in New York City. By this point a costly world tour had depleted most of Grant’s personal savings, so Twain encouraged the president to publish his memoirs. 12 Grant did not believe his memoirs would be profitable, writing in a January 1881 letter to Twain, “I have always distrusted my ability to write anything that would satisfy myself and the public would be much more difficult to please. In the second place I am not possessed of the kind of industry necessary to undertake such a work.” 13

Several years later, after a failed railroad venture plunged Grant and his wife Julia into near destitution, he reconsidered. In 1884, he wrote several articles for The Century Magazine at $500 per article. This venture encouraged the former president to write his memoirs, right around the same time doctors diagnosed him with throat cancer that fall. 14

Meanwhile, Mark Twain busied himself preparing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for publication. After he experienced a falling out with several publishers, Twain established his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Publishing, to produce this new book. One night in November 1884, Twain ran into Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine . Gilder invited Twain and his wife to dinner at his home. Gilder told Twain about Grant’s articles and let slip that the former president was prepared to write his memoirs. 15

This 1885 engraving depicts the title character Huckleberry Finn from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain published the novel in 1885, through his publishing company Charles L. Webster & Publishing. Twain also published Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant through this publishing company the same year.

Armed with this information, Twain went to Grant’s house the very next morning to ask whether he signed the contract with Century. Grant responded that the contract was drawn but not signed. Twain reviewed the contract, appalled to discover Century’s offer of ten percent royalty. Instead, Twain offered to publish Grant’s memoirs at his new publishing house. 16 Grant deliberated over this proposition, initially reluctant to renege on his original agreement with Century. However, after comparing offers and discussing the matter with his son, Colonel Frederick Dent Grant, Grant wrote to his financial advisor George W. Childs on November 23, 1884: “On reexamining the Contract prepared by the Century people I see that it is all in favor of the publisher, with nothing left for the Author. I am offered very much more favorable terms by Chas L. Webster & Co. Mark Twain is the Company.” 17 Twain offered Grant a choice, a twenty percent royalty or seventy percent of the total profit. Grant chose the latter and signed the contract. 18

Grant began writing as the cancer ravaged his body. By the winter of 1885, his health deteriorated to the point he could no longer leave the house. Twain visited Grant in late February. Stunned by the former president’s declining health, Twain feared Grant would not live to finish his memoirs. 19 But Grant persevered, brushing off several close calls with death to continue his work.

Meanwhile, Twain navigated the publishing world, communicating with Century about Grant’s magazine articles and responding to claims about the true authorship of Grant’s memoirs. On April 29, Theron C. Crawford, correspondent for the New York World, alleged that Grant’s assistant, Adam Badeau, an accomplished author in his own right, was the true writer behind the memoirs. Several years prior, Badeau, who worked as part of Grant’s Union Army staff during the Civil War, published Military History of Ulysses S. Grant. 20 Twain responded publicly in early May, publishing a letter from Grant in the New York Tribune emphatically denying the charges, “This is false. The composition is entirely my own.” 21 Shortly after, Badeau parted ways with Grant in an attempt to quell the rumors.

Draft pages from Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant written by Ulysses S. Grant in 1885.

On June 16, Grant relocated from his home in New York City to a cottage called Mount McGregor in the Adirondack Mountains at the advice of his doctor. 22 One week later, as Grant moved into the final stages of writing, he grappled with his impending death in a letter to his physician, John H. Douglas: “I said I had been adding to my book and to my coffin. I presume every strain of the mind and body is one more nail in the coffin.” 23

Twain joined Grant at Mount McGregor on June 27. Grant could barely speak, and the two men communicated by slips of paper as they went over page proofs together. During this visit, Grant completed his chapter on Appomattox and assessments of Lincoln and several Civil War generals. Twain departed for Elmira, New York, and the friends continued to correspond during the final days of June. 24 Grant wrote in one letter, “There is much more that I could do if I was a well man. I do not write as clearly as I could if well.” 25 On July 1, 1885, he wrote a preface which Twain immediately released to the public. With the preface written, at long last Grant finished his book. Just three weeks later, on July 23, 1885, President Ulysses S. Grant passed away surrounded by his loved ones. 26

As the nation mourned the death of their beloved general and president, Twain worked to prepare Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant for publication. The two-volume set detailing Grant’s life, Civil War experiences, and portraits of famous men, including Abraham Lincoln, was a major financial success. The first printing alone sold 300,000 sets and Twain presented Julia Grant with a check for $200,000. After additional sales, the royalties eventually totaled $450,000 (or twelve million dollars in today’s currency), affording Mrs. Grant a comfortable retirement. 27

This photograph by Mathew Brady depicts First Lady Julia Dent Grant

In addition to its great financial success, critics lauded Personal Memoirs as a literary classic. On February 3, 1886, Twain wrote to Julia Grant, “An able critic told me the other day that the Memoirs are so noble a literary masterpiece that they will long outlast any other monument that can be erected to the memory of General Grant.” 28 Ultimately, the relationship between Grant and Twain, formed during that fateful first meeting in Washington, resulted in an enriching friendship which helped cement President Grant’s legacy. Although Grant’s writing was driven mostly by his and his family’s financial needs, he began a historic trend of presidents writing their memoirs for public consumption after leaving office.

This was originally published on June 19, 2019

Footnotes & Resources

• Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography, (Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg,) Accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.gutenberg.org/files... .
• Mark Twain, Frederick Anderson, Michael Barry Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson, Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, 1855-1873, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 455.
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family, November 25, 1867, Washington, D.C.,” Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL00162.xml;query=;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1.
• Twain, Anderson, Frank, and Sanderson, “Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals,” 491.
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens and Pamela A. Moffett, January 20, 1868, Washington, D.C., Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.or...
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens To Elisha Bliss, Jr., January 27, 1868, New York, N.Y.,” Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL00185.xml;query=;searchAll=;sectionType1=;sectionType2=;sectionType3=;sectionType4=;sectionType5=;style=letter;brand=mtp#1; Samuel Langhorne Clemens To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family, March 8-10,1868, Washington, D.C., or New York, N.Y., Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 29, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.or... .
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Orion Clemens, February 21, 1868, Washington, D.C.,” Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 28, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.or... .
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Olivia L. Clemens, July 6 1870, Washington, D.C., Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 29, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.or... .
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Olivia L. Clemens, July 8, 1870, Washington, D.C., Mark Twain Project, Accessed May 30, 2019, http://www.marktwainproject.or...
• Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain a Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg,) Accessed May 30, 2019 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2988/2988-h/2988-h.htm#link2H_4_0129; Mark Perry, Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship that Changed America, (New York: Random House, 2004, xxvi.
• Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, (New York: Random House, 2016), 624-625.
• Ulysses S. Grant to Samuel L. Clemens, January 14, 1881, New York City, Grant Papers at Mississippi State University, 30:118-119, Accessed May 30, 2019, https://msstate.contentdm.oclc... .
• White, 636-637.
• Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith, and Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), 637-639.
• Ulysses S. Grant to George W. Childs, November 23, 1884, Grant Papers at Mississippi State University, 30:118-119, Accessed May 30, 2019, https://msstate.contentdm.oclc... .
• Griffin, Smith, and Twain, 5297l.
• Ibid; 5297o; White, 640.
• White, 644-645.
• Griffin, Smith, and Twain, 5298d.
• White, 646-647.
• The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 31: January 1 1883-July 23, 1885, Grant Papers at Mississippi State University, 31:383, Accessed June 3, 2019, https://msstate.contentdm.oclc... .
• White, 647.
• Ulysses S. Grant to Samuel L. Clemens, June 29-30, 1885, Mount McGregor New York, Grant Papers at Mississippi State University, 31: 390, Accessed June 3, 2019, https://msstate.contentdm.oclc... .
• White, 650-651.
• Ibid, 656-657; Griffin, Smith, and Twain, 5298c.
• “The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 31: January 1 1883-July 23, 1885, Grant Papers at Mississippi State University, 31:367, Accessed June 3, 2019, https://msstate.contentdm.oclc... .

You Might Also Like

America’s Irish Roots

Featuring Geraldine Byrne Nason, Ambassador of Ireland to the United States

Washington National Cathedral & the White House

Featuring Very Reverend Randolph Hollerith and Reverend Canon Jan Naylor Cope

The Nixon White House 1969 - 1974

On January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the thirty-seventh president of the United States. During his time in the White House (1969–74), President Nixon sought to unite a divided nation after the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. Before becoming president, Nixon served in the U.S. Navy, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and as

Presidential and First Lady Portraits

Since 1965, the White House Historical Association has been proud to fund the official portraits of our presidents and first ladies, a long-standing tradition of the White House Collection. Recent presidents and first ladies typically select their respective artists before leaving the White House and approve the portraits before their formal presentation to the public and induction into the collection. The

The 2022 White House Christmas Ornament

Every year since 1981, the White House Historical Association has had the privilege of designing the Official White House Christmas Ornament. These unique collectibles — honoring individual presidents or specific White House anniversaries — have become part of the holiday tradition for millions of American families. In this collection, explore the history behind our 2022 design and learn more about President Richard Nixon. Buy the

White House Builder James Hoban’s Irish Roots

Featuring Laurie Grace, Chairman of the James Hoban Society of Ireland; Brother Christy O’Carroll, Congregation of Christian Brothers; Ciarán O’Connor, State Architect of Ireland; Merlo Kelly, Senior Architect, Lotts Architecture & Urbanism; Brian O’Connell, Director and Founder of O’Connell Mahon Architects and a contributor to the book James Hoban: Designer and Builder of the White House

Weddings and the White House

From First Lady Dolley Madison's sister Lucy Payne Washington's wedding in 1812 to the nuptials of President Joseph Biden and First Lady Jill Biden's granddaughter Naomi Biden on the South Lawn in November 2022, the White House has long been the site of wedding ceremonies and receptions. In over two hundred years, there have been nineteen documented weddings and four receptions hosted

The Ford White House 1974 - 1977

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., the nation’s only unelected president and vice president, served thirteen terms in Congress before rising to national attention in 1973, when President Richard Nixon nominated him as vice president. Less than a year later, Ford became president, following President Nixon's resignation from office. The Fords made and celebrated history during their time in the White House, fr

Dinner with the President

Featuring Alex Prud’homme, bestselling author and great-nephew of cooking legend Julia Child

Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President

Featuring Jonathan Darman, author of “Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President"

250 Years of American Political Leadership

Featuring Iain Dale, award-winning British author and radio and podcast host

The 2023 White House Christmas Ornament

Every year since 1981, the White House Historical Association has had the privilege of designing the Official White House Christmas Ornament. These unique collectibles — honoring individual presidents or specific White House anniversaries — have become part of the holiday tradition for millions of American families. In this collection, explore the history behind our 2023 design and learn more about President Gerald R. Ford. Buy

A Life Lived in a Rapidly Changing World: Samuel L. Clemens‚ 1835-1910

As twain’s books provide insight into the past‚ the events of his personal life further demonstrate his role as an eyewitness to history..

During his lifetime‚ Sam Clemens watched a young United States evolve from a nation torn apart by internal conflicts to one of international power. He experienced America’s vast growth and change – from westward expansion to industrialization‚ the end of slavery‚ advancements in technology‚ big government and foreign wars. And along the way‚ he often had something to say about the changes happening in his country.

The Early Years

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30‚ 1835 in Florida‚ Missouri‚ the sixth of seven children. At age 4‚ Sam and his family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal‚ Missouri‚ on the banks of the Mississippi River. Missouri‚ at the time‚ was a fairly new state (it had gained statehood in 1821) and made up part of the country’s western border. It was also a state that took part in slavery. Sam’s father owned one enslaved person, and his uncle owned several. In fact‚ it was on his uncle’s farm that Sam spent many boyhood summers playing in the enslaved people’s quarters‚ listening to tall tales and the spirituals that he would enjoy throughout his life.

In 1847‚ when Sam was 11‚ his father died. Shortly thereafter he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. His job was to arrange the type for each of the newspaper’s stories‚ allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work.

Twain’s Young Adult Life

At 18‚ Sam headed east to New York City and Philadelphia‚ where he worked on several different newspapers and found some success at writing articles. By 1857‚ he had returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861‚ however‚ all traffic along the river came to a halt‚ as did Sam’s pilot career. Inspired by the times‚ Sam joined up with a volunteer Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers‚ but he quit after just two weeks.

In search of a new career‚ Sam headed west in July 1861‚ at the invitation of his brother‚ Orion‚ who had just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Lured by the infectious hope of striking it rich in Nevada’s silver rush‚ Sam traveled across the open frontier from Missouri to Nevada by stagecoach. Along the journey Sam encountered Native American tribes for the first time, along with a variety of unique characters‚ mishaps, and disappointments. These events would find a way into his short stories and books‚ particularly   Roughing It .

After failing as a silver prospector‚ Sam began writing for the Territorial Enterprise‚ a Virginia City‚ Nevada newspaper where he used‚ for the first time‚ his pen name‚ Mark Twain. Seeking change, by 1864 Sam headed for San Francisco where he continued to write for local papers.

In 1865 Sam’s first “big break” came with the publication of his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog ” in papers across the country. A year later Sam was hired by the Sacramento Union to visit and report on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His writings were so popular that‚ upon his return‚ he embarked upon his first lecture tour‚ which established him as a successful stage performer.

Hired by the Alta California to continue his travel writing from the east‚ Sam arrived in New York City in 1867. He quickly signed up for a steamship tour of Europe and the “Holy Land.” His travel letters‚ full of vivid descriptions and tongue-in-cheek observations‚ met with such audience approval that they were later reworked into his first book‚  The Innocents Abroad , published in 1869. It was also on this trip that Clemens met his future brother-in-law‚ Charles Langdon. Langdon reportedly showed Sam a picture of his sister‚  Olivia ‚ and Sam fell in love at first sight.

Twain Starts a Family and Moves to Hartford

After courting for two years‚ Sam Clemens and Olivia (Livy) Langdon were married in 1870. They settled in Buffalo‚ New York‚ where Sam had become a partner‚ editor, and writer for the daily newspaper the  Buffalo Express . While they were living in Buffalo‚ their first child‚ Langdon Clemens‚ was born.

In 1871 Sam moved his family to Hartford‚ Connecticut‚ a city he had come to love while visiting his publisher there and where he had made friends. Livy also had family connections to the city. For the first few years the Clemenses rented a house in the heart of Nook Farm‚ a residential area that was home to numerous writers‚ publishers, and other prominent figures. In 1872 Sam’s recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book  Roughing It . That same year the Clemenses’ first daughter Susy was born‚ but their son‚ Langdon‚ died at age two from diphtheria.

In 1873 Sam’s focus turned toward social criticism. He and Hartford Courant publisher Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote  The Gilded Age ‚ a novel that attacked political corruption‚ big business, and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era. Ironically‚ a year after its publication‚ the Clemenses’ elaborate 25-room house on Farmington Avenue‚ which had cost the then-huge sum of $40‚000-$45‚000‚ was completed.

Twain Writes his Most Famous Books While Living in Hartford

For the next 17 years (1874-1891)‚ Sam‚ Livy, and their three daughters (Clara was born in 1874 and Jean in 1880) lived in the Hartford home. During those years Sam completed some of his most famous books‚ often finding a summer refuge for uninterrupted work at his sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira‚ New York. Novels such as  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) and  Life on the Mississippi (1883) captured both his Missouri memories and depictions of the American scene. Yet his social commentary continued.  The Prince and the Pauper  (1881) explored class relations, as does  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  (1889), which‚ going a step further‚ criticized oppression in general while examining the period’s explosion of new technologies. And‚ in perhaps his most famous work‚  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1884)‚ Clemens‚ by the way he attacked the institution of slavery‚ railed against the failures of Reconstruction and the continued poor treatment of African Americans in his own time.

Huckleberry Finn  was also the first book published by Sam’s own publishing company‚ The Charles L. Webster Company. In an attempt to gain control over publication as well as to make substantial profits‚ Sam created the company in 1884. A year later he contracted with Ulysses S. Grant to publish Grant’s memoirs; the two-volume set provided large royalties for Grant’s widow and was a financial success for the publisher as well.

Twain’s Financial Ruin and Subsequent Travels

Although Sam enjoyed financial success during his Hartford years‚ he continually made bad investments in new inventions‚ which eventually brought him to bankruptcy. In an effort to economize and pay back his debts‚ Sam and Livy moved their family to Europe in 1891. When his publishing company failed in 1894‚ Sam was forced to set out on a worldwide lecture tour to earn money. In 1896 tragedy struck when Susy Clemens‚ at age 24‚ died from meningitis while on a visit to the Hartford home. Unable to bear being in the place of her death‚ the Clemenses never returned to Hartford to live.

From 1891 until 1900‚ Sam and his family traveled throughout the world. During those years Sam witnessed the increasing exploitation of weaker governments by European powers‚ which he described in his book  Following the Equator  (1897). The Boer War in South Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China fueled his growing anger toward imperialistic countries and their actions. With the Spanish-American and Philippine wars in 1898‚ Sam’s wrath was redirected toward the American government. When he returned to the United States in 1900‚ his finances restored‚ Sam readily declared himself an anti-imperialist and‚ from 1901 until his death‚ served as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League.

Twain’s Darkest Times and Late Life

In these later years‚ Sam’s writings turned dark. They began to focus on human greed and cruelty and questioned the humanity of the human race. His public speeches followed suit and included a harshly sarcastic public introduction of Winston Churchill in 1900. Even though Sam’s lecture tour had managed to get him out of debt‚ his anti-government writings and speeches threatened his livelihood once again. As Sam was labeled by some as a traitor‚ several of his works were never published during his lifetime, either because magazines would not accept them or because of his own personal fear that his marketable reputation would be ruined.

In 1903‚ after living in New York City for three years‚ Livy became ill, and Sam and his wife returned to Italy, where she died a year later. After her death‚ Sam lived in New York until 1908, when he moved into his last house‚ “Stormfield,” in Redding‚ Connecticut. In 1909 his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean‚ the youngest daughter‚ died from an epileptic seizure. Four months later, on April 21‚ 1910‚ Sam Clemens died at age 74.

Like any good journalist‚ Sam Clemens‚ a.k.a. Mark Twain‚ spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the strengths and weaknesses of a rapidly changing world. By examining his life and his works‚ we can read into the past – piecing together various events of the era and the responses to them. We can delve into the American mindset of the late nineteenth century and make our own observations of history‚ discover new connections‚ create new inferences and gain better insights into the time period and the people who lived in it. As Sam once wrote‚ “Supposing is good‚ but finding out is better.”

Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant served as U.S. general and commander of the Union armies during the late years of the American Civil War, later becoming the 18th U.S. president.

(1822-1885)

Who Was Ulysses S. Grant?

Quick facts.

FULL NAME: Hiram Ulysses Grant BORN: April 27, 1822 DIED: July 23, 1885 BIRTHPLACE: Point Pleasant, Ohio SPOUSE: Julia Dent (1848-1885) CHILDREN: Frederick, Ulysses Jr., Ellen, Jesse ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Early Years

Origins of “u.s.” grant nickname.

His famous moniker, "U.S. Grant," came after he joined the military.

Grant was born Hiram Ulysses and went by Ulysses as a child. However, when he arrived at West Point, he expected to be listed on the sheet of incoming cadets by his birth name and was surprised to learn there was no H.U. Grant on the roll call but a U.S. Grant. The clerical error had been made by the Ohio Congressman who nominated Grant to West Point, who may have accidentally combined Grant’s middle name with his mother’s maiden name, Simpson.

Not wanting to make a fuss as a new arrival at West Point and risk being rejected, Grant agreed to go along with the name change but later joked that the “S” in his name stood for nothing. Fellow soldiers at West Point called the newly christened U.S. Grant “Sam,” a shortened version of Uncle Sam.

Wife and Family

After graduation from West Point, Lieutenant Grant was stationed in St. Louis, Missouri, where he met his future wife, Julia Dent, the sister of Grant’s West Point roommate. Grant proposed marriage in 1844, but both families were unhappy with the match. Grant’s abolitionist father disapproved of the Dents owning enslaved people, and Julia’s father considered Grant a low-paid soldier with little prospect of financial success.

The couple initially kept their engagement secret, but Grant eventually won over Julia’s father, and the pair received permission to marry. Their plans were interrupted by the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, which led to a nearly four-year separation. They finally wed in 1848 and would have four children: Frederick (1850), Ulysses Jr., known as “Buck" (1852), Ellen, known as “Nellie” (1855), and Jesse (1858).

The Grants were a close couple, and the frequent separations early in the marriage due to Grant’s military postings affected them both, particularly Ulysses, whose loneliness and isolation from his family likely exacerbated his drinking. During Grant’s Civil War service, Julia often visited him at army camps, sometimes bringing their children. When Grant became president, she bloomed into a popular first lady, hosting social receptions while remaining a close advisor to her husband, even meeting with cabinet members and politicians.

Early Military Career

During the Mexican-American War , Grant served as a quartermaster, efficiently overseeing the movement of supplies. Serving under General Zachary Taylor and later under General Winfield Scott, he closely observed their military tactics and leadership skills. After getting the opportunity to lead a company into combat, Grant was credited for his bravery under fire. He also developed strong feelings that the war was wrong and that it was being waged only to increase America's territory for the spread of slavery.

In 1852, he was sent to Fort Vancouver, in what is now Washington State. He missed Dent and his two sons—the second of whom he had not yet seen at this time—and thusly became involved in several failed business ventures to get his family to the coast, closer to him.

He began to drink, not unlike other soldiers—and many other Americans—in an era where alcohol consumption rates were much higher than today. Grant’s thin frame and small stature meant he showed the effects of alcohol quicker than many others. Grant developed a reputation for drinking that dogged him throughout his military career. Still, most of these episodes occurred, especially in the early years of his service, when he was separated from his family and sent to ever-more isolated army postings that left him bored and lonely with little else to do.

In the summer of 1853, Grant was promoted to captain and transferred to Fort Humboldt on the Northern California coast, where he had a run-in with the fort's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Buchanan. On July 31, 1854, Grant resigned from the Army amid allegations of heavy drinking and warnings of disciplinary action.

In 1854, Grant moved his family back to Missouri, but the return to civilian life led him to a low point. He tried to farm land given to him by his father-in-law, but this venture proved unsuccessful after a few years. Grant then failed to find success with a real estate venture and was denied employment as an engineer and clerk in St. Louis. To support his family, he was reduced to selling firewood on a St. Louis street. Finally, in 1860, he humbled himself and worked in his father's tannery business as a clerk, supervised by his two younger brothers.

Ulysses S. Grant and Slavery

Like many of his contemporaries, Grant’s involvement with slavery was complicated. An abolitionist father raised him and personally professed his dislike of slavery. But he married the daughter of a slave-holding plantation owner, and the Dent family’s enslaved population often worked alongside Grant at the farm he built on land given to him by his father-in-law. In the late 1850s, he was transferred ownership of an enslaved man, William Jones. In 1859, Grant freed Jones despite severe financial difficulties that might otherwise have led him to sell Jones for a profit.

While Grant’s service in the Civil War was initially inspired by his desire to defend and reunite the Union, he supported Abraham Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved peoples in Confederate states that had seceded. When the Proclamation went into effect in January 1863, Grant ensured the newly freed formerly enslaved were cared for when they reached Union lines and encouraged Lincoln to allow formerly enslaved men to join the Union Army, which he believed would significantly weaken the Confederate cause.

American Civil War

On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. This rebellion sparked Grant's patriotism, and he volunteered his military service. Again, he was initially rejected for positions, but with the aid of an Illinois congressman, he was appointed a colonel and took command of an unruly 21st Illinois volunteer regiment. Applying lessons he'd learned from his commanders during the Mexican-American War, Grant saw that the regiment was combat-ready by September 1861. By that point, he had been promoted to brigadier general.

When Kentucky's fragile neutrality fell apart in the fall of 1861, Grant and his volunteers took the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, at the mouth of the Tennessee River. In February 1862, in a joint operation with the U.S. Navy, Grant's ground forces applied pressure on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, taking them both. These battles are the earliest significant Union victories of the American Civil War. After the assault on Fort Donelson, Grant earned the moniker "Unconditional Surrender Grant" and was promoted to major general of volunteers.

READ MORE: How Ulysses S. Grant Earned the Nickname "Unconditional Surrender Grant"

Battle of Shiloh

In April 1862, Grant moved his army cautiously into enemy territory in Tennessee in what would later become known as the Battle of Shiloh (or the Battle of Pittsburg Landing), one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles. Confederate commanders Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard led a surprise attack against Grant's forces, with fierce fighting occurring at an area known as the "Hornets' Nest" during the first wave of assault. Confederate General Johnston was mortally wounded, and his second-in-command, General Beauregard, decided against a night assault on Grant's forces. Reinforcement finally arrived, and Grant defeated the Confederates during the second day of battle.

The Battle of Shiloh proved to be a watershed for the American military and a near disaster for Grant. Though President Abraham Lincoln supported him, Grant faced heavy criticism from members of Congress and the military brass for the high casualties, and for a time, he was demoted. A war department investigation led to his reinstatement.

Vicksburg Siege

The Union war strategy called for taking control of the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half. In December 1862, Grant moved overland to take Vicksburg —a key fortress city of the Confederacy—but Confederate cavalry raider Nathan Bedford Forest stalled his attack due to getting bogged down in the bayous north of Vicksburg. In his second attempt, Grant cut some, but not all, of his supply lines, moved his men down the western bank of the Mississippi River, and crossed south of Vicksburg. Failing to take the city after several assaults, he settled into a long siege, and Vicksburg finally surrendered on July 4, 1863. Grant was named major general of the regular U.S. Army.

Though Vicksburg marked Grant's most outstanding achievement thus far and a morale boost for the Union, rumors of Grant's heavy drinking followed him through the rest of the Western Campaign. Grant suffered from intense migraine headaches due to stress, which nearly disabled him and only helped to spread rumors of his drinking, as many chalked up his migraines to frequent hangovers. However, his closest associates said that he was sober and polite and displayed deep concentration, even amid a battle. When confronted by these rumors, President Abraham Lincoln was unperturbed, reportedly offering to send a case of Grant’s favorite whisky to other Union generals in the hope of achieving Grant’s stunning military results.

Battle for Chattanooga

In January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, freeing enslaved peoples in the Confederate states that had seceded from the Union.

In October 1863, Grant took command at Chattanooga, Tennessee. The following month, from November 22 to November 25, Union forces routed Confederate troops in Tennessee at the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, known collectively as the Battle of Chattanooga . The victories forced the Confederates to retreat into Georgia, ending the siege of the vital railroad junction of Chattanooga—and ultimately paving the way for Union General William Tecumseh Sherman 's Atlanta campaign and march to Savannah, Georgia, in 1864.

Union Victory

Grant saw the military objectives of the Civil War differently than most of his predecessors, who believed that capturing territory was most important to winning the war. Grant adamantly believed that taking down the Confederate armies was most important to the war effort and, to that end, set out to track down and destroy General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

In March 1864, Grant was named lieutenant general of the U.S. Army (the first person to achieve this rank since George Washington) and given command of all U.S. armies. He quickly set out to congruent Lee, and from March 1864 until April 1865, Grant doggedly hunted for Lee in the forests of Virginia, all the while inflicting unsustainable casualties on Lee's army.

On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered his army, marking the end of the Civil War. The two generals met at a farm near the village of Appomattox Court House, and a peace agreement was signed. In a generous gesture, Grant allowed Lee's men to keep their horses and return to their homes, taking none of them as prisoners of war.

During the post-war reorganization, Grant was promoted to full general and oversaw the military portion of Reconstruction . In 1867, Grant was caught up in a scandal involving Republican Andrew Johnson's fight with the Radical Republican wing of his party. Johnson tried to remove his Secretary of War, who had often sided with the Radical Republican wing over the more robust implementation of Reconstruction in the South and initially tried to replace him, Grant, all without the necessary Congressional approval. During the subsequent uproar, Grant resigned from the position. Still, Johnson’s determination to proceed with his plan with a different appointee made him the first U.S. president to be impeached.

Despite having never been elected to any previous political office, in 1868, Grant ran for president on the Republican ticket and was elected the 18th president of the United States. When he entered the White House the following year, Grant was not only politically inexperienced but also—at the age of 46—the youngest president theretofore.

Grant had many achievements as president, pushing through ratification of the 15th Amendment , creating the forerunner to the National Weather Service and America’s first national park (Yellowstone), instituting the first Civil Service Commission (aimed at replacing the corrupt patronage system that controlled many government jobs), working with Native American leaders to develop a peace plan in the West and naming Eli Parker as the first Native American head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Grant also oversaw the creation of the U.S. Justice Department, using the new department, in part, to help strengthen and enforce laws aimed at curbing the rise of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

However, Grant’s administration faced numerous setbacks, including a prolonged economic depression in 1873. Though scrupulously honest, Grant became known for appointing people who were not of good character, and his presidency today is often more remembered for its notable scandals than its successes. In 1869, two Wall Street speculators (whom Grant knew from before becoming president) attempted to corner the gold market and ensnare Grant in their scheme, leading to a financial panic. In 1875, Grant’s private secretary was embroiled in a scandal that intended to deprive the federal government of millions of dollars in revenues from liquor taxes, and even Grant’s brother was later involved in a kickback scheme involving military contracts. By the end of his second term, several members of Grant’s cabinet had been accused of taking bribes. Grant called for proper legal investigations for those involved, and during his final address to Congress in 1876, he discussed his lack of political experience upon entering the office and the resulting issues during his presidency, noting , “Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

Final Years and Death

After leaving the White House, Grant's lack of success in civilian life continued once again. He became a partner of the financial firm Grant and Ward only to have his partner, Ferdinand Ward, embezzle investors' money. The firm went bankrupt in 1884, as did Grant. That same year, Grant learned that he had throat cancer, and though his military pension was reinstated, he was strapped for cash.

Grant began selling short magazine articles about his life and then negotiated a contract with a friend, famed novelist Mark Twain , to publish his memoirs. The two-volume set sold 300,000 copies, becoming a classic work of American literature. Ultimately, the work earned Grant's family nearly $450,000.

READ MORE: The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant

Grant died on July 23, 1885—just as his memoirs were being published—at 63, in Mount McGregor, New York. He was buried in New York City, with more than 1.5 million attending his funeral. His temporary burial site was greatly expanded and became popularly known as Grant’s Tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America. In 1914, Grant became the face of the U.S. Treasury’s $50 bill, and in 1922, to mark the centennial of his birth, the U.S. Mint released gold dollars and silver half dollars featuring Grant, partly to raise funds to preserve his Ohio birthplace.

Grant’s reputation has seen notable shifts over time. While many of his contemporary Americans lauded him for his Civil War service and liked Grant personally, the scandals surrounding his presidency led him to be ranked among the most unsuccessful presidents in history. Historians and writers began reappraising Grant's legacy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They noted his success in preserving the Union in the post-war years that saw it roiled by debates over the federal government’s role in southern Reconstruction. He has been lauded for his attempted civil service reforms, his vigorous defense of the civil liberties of African Americans, and his policy towards Native Americans (Grant favored giving them American citizenship nearly 50 years before that became a reality). A highly skilled military commander, Grant could not translate those talents to the presidency, with both his personal and political naivete regarding those surrounding him obscuring his notable achievements.

• Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a government, and laws and a flag and they must all be sustained.
• I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
• [My] failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.
• A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer; I signify all three.
• It occurred to me at once that [my enemy] had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.
• I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
• I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the presidency.
• No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.
• I don't know anything of party politics, and I don't want to.
• I know only two tunes: One of them is 'Yankee Doodle' and the other isn't.
• The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
• I can't spare this man—he fights.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Watch Next .css-smpm16:after{background-color:#323232;color:#fff;margin-left:1.8rem;margin-top:1.25rem;width:1.5rem;height:0.063rem;content:'';display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}

U.S. Presidents

Oppenheimer and Truman Met Once. It Went Badly.

Who Killed JFK? You Won’t Believe Us Anyway

John F. Kennedy

Jimmy Carter

Inside Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77-Year Love

Abraham Lincoln

Who Is Walt Nauta, the Man Indicted with Trump?

Hunter Biden and Other Presidential Problem Kids

Controversial Judge Aileen Cannon Not Out Just Yet

Barack Obama

10 Celebrities the Same Age as President Joe Biden

A Brief History of Presidential Memoirs

Barack Obama’s new autobiography joins a long—but sometimes dull—tradition

Livia Gershon

Daily Correspondent

Next week, the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, A Promised Land , hits bookstores. Will it be any good? For Rutgers University historian David Greenberg , the answer depends on which writing mode the former president, who’s already written two earlier memoirs, chooses.

“His first memoir, written before he was really on the political scene, was a genuine book, a genuine memoir,” says Greenberg, who is currently writing a biography of Rep. John Lewis .

Reviewers at the time generally praised Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams From My Father , for its literary merit. In 2006, as the then-senator prepared to run for president, he wrote another book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream .

“The thing about Audacity of Hope is it’s really a lousy book,” Greenberg says. “It’s a standard campaign book. We see these all the time.”

A Promised Land

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy

Like texts written largely to propel candidates’ campaigns forward, memoirs—albeit of varying focus and quality—are now a standard part of presidential careers. But scholars who study the presidency say that’s a fairly new historical development.

Historian Craig Fehrman , author of the recent book Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote , says that in the United States’ early years, former presidents would never have considered publishing autobiographical books in their own lifetimes.

“It would be seen as arrogant and vain,” he explains.

According to Fehrman, four of the nation’s first five presidents at least tried to write books, with the understanding that these manuscripts would only be published after their authors’ deaths. The best-known resulting work was a four-volume compilation of Thomas Jefferson’s writings , including a memoir, letters and other assorted musings. In addition to helping cement Jefferson’s legacy, the publication improved his family’s financial situation, enabling them to recover from significant debt.

“It was a huge best seller,” Fehrman says, selling tens of thousands of copies—no small feat at the time.

The first ex-president to publish a book in his own lifetime was James Buchanan, who left office in 1861. Many modern historians view him a disaster of a leader who failed to address slavery or prevent the secession of Southern states. And Fehrman deems his book pretty terrible, too.

“Buchanan’s is definitely the worst presidential memoir I’ve read,” the historian says. “It’s mostly just James Buchanan trying to blame everyone except James Buchanan for the war and its aftermath.”

Nonetheless, Fehrman adds, people bought Buchanan’s book. The Civil War marked a turning point for presidential memoir, as after the fact, Americans were desperate to understand their national trauma. This desire led to a boom of books by generals and politicians, among them what many historians consider the best book ever written by an ex-president: Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant . (It’s worth noting, however, that the two-volume set wasn’t about the presidency, but rather Grant’s role in leading the Union forces during the Civil War.)

“Once there was this explosion of literary interest after the Civil War, the biggest target was Grant,” Fehrman says.

When he left the White House in 1877, Grant didn’t think of himself as a writer. But after a business partner got the former president’s investment firm involved in a pyramid scheme that ended up bankrupting him , publishers talked Grant into writing some magazine articles for which he was very well compensated. Fehrman says Grant found that he liked writing. Mark Twain, in his role as publisher, convinced Grant to try a book. At the time he was writing, Grant was dying of cancer, and the media ate up his race to finish the memoir.

“Newspapers would have stories: ‘He went for a walk.’ ‘He finished a couple of pages.’ It was a national obsession,” Fehrman says.

Grant died in July 1885, a week after finishing the manuscript. When Twain published the work later that year, it was a runaway success. Readers at the time and since appreciated Grant’s honesty about his own mistakes, as well as his eyewitness account of the war. As 20th-century critic Edmund Wilson wrote , Grant “conveyed the suspense which was felt by himself and his army and by all who believed in the Union cause. The reader finds himself on edge to know how the civil war is coming out.”

Ultimately, the memoir made Grant’s family the equivalent of $12 million in today’s dollars. At the time, Fehrman notes, books were a serious luxury, but then and in the decades that followed, a huge swath of Americans used their limited entertainment budgets to purchase books by and about presidents.

One text that both Fehrman and Greenberg say holds up particularly well is Calvin Coolidge’s relatively short autobiography. Rather than focusing on policy debates or settling scores, Coolidge wrote about the experience of being president.

“He’s not on most people’s presidential shortlist, but he’s a really, really good writer,” Fehrman says. “Nobody’s heard of it today, but it was one of the biggest books of 1929.”

In his own book, Fehrman quotes suffragist Emily Newell Blair—who was decidedly not a Coolidge fan—praising the president’s memoir in Good Housekeeping . “Nothing could educate us better for choosing our public officials than to read after each administration the ex-president’s own interpretation of his life and experience,” she wrote.

Beginning with Harry S. Truman in 1955, almost all former presidents tried to satisfy the public hunger for these kinds of insights. George C. Edwards III , a political scientist at Texas A&M University and editor of the Presidential Studies Quarterly, says the shift happened at a time when presidential libraries were just getting started. Franklin D. Roosevelt created the first one in 1941, and Truman’s opened in 1957.

“They started thinking about history in a more systemic way,” Edwards says. “I think there was a broader concern about history, and about the historical record, that developed about that same time.”

In addition to the financial reasons cited by his predecessors, Truman wrote his memoirs in an effort to define his time in office for posterity. He explained, for example, what he was thinking at key points in the Korean War, which had become quite unpopular by the time he left office.

“He probably wanted to set the record straight because he did not retire at the peak of popularity,” Edwards says.

According to Edwards, the presidential memoirs published after Truman’s have ranged from slick to introspective and relatively brief to multi-volume doorstops.

“Some are light reading, almost,” he says. “Some are tedious reading.”

Unfortunately for readers, Fehrman notes, many former presidents focused on burnishing their records at the cost of interesting tidbits. In recorded sessions with his ghost writers, the famously brash and profane Lyndon B. Johnson told wild stories and pointed out interesting dynamics like what he viewed as President John F. Kennedy’s somewhat desperate need for approval.

“Then they would write it up and bring it back to him, and he would say, ‘It’s not presidential,’” Fehrman says. In fact, when Fehrman edited an anthology of the best presidential writing, he ended up using a transcript of one of those interviews, which were released decades after the fact, rather than an excerpt from the memoir.

“It’s a genre where a lot of good writers have lost the thread, become too focused on settling scores, or listing every person at a meeting,” he says.

Regardless of how much spin former presidents’ books contain, Edwards says historians and political scientists generally feel the need to consult them when writing about a president’s record.

“It’s a statement that is useful, what they have to say and what they were thinking—or at least what they say they were thinking,” he says. “It’s not the last word, but it is an important word. I would think it would be very odd if you wanted to write a biography of a president and not refer to their memoirs.”

But Greenberg says there can be some pitfalls to paying too much attention to presidents’ own words. In Richard Nixon’s first memoir, written before his presidency, he claimed that he didn’t challenge the outcome of his close race against Kennedy in 1960.

“It’s a complete lie—he did contest it,” Greenberg says. (The Republican Party launched legal challenges against Kennedy’s victories in 11 states, though Nixon did publicly distance himself from these efforts.) “A lot of good Nixon biographers have taken [Nixon’s] claim at face value. Some very good biographers and historians whom I admire have rather credulously repeated things from Nixon’s memoir as if it were true. And Nixon of all people, you should not trust his memoir.”

Ultimately, the most interesting thing about memoirs may be not what they tell us about presidents but what they say about American readers. Fehrman says the U.S. has always been a “nation of nonfiction.” In particular, autobiographies, from narratives by formerly enslaved people to the writings of the most powerful, have always sold well in the country. And, the historian adds, Americans have always read presidents’ words through the lens of citizenship.

“We want to know what they believe in—we want to use that information as voters,” Fehrman says. “The books can be seen as punchlines, but readers have taken them seriously.”

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Click to visit our Privacy Statement .

A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

Livia Gershon | | READ MORE

Livia Gershon is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian. She is also a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for JSTOR Daily , the Daily Beast , the Boston Globe , HuffPost  and Vice , among others.

• Huskie Link
• Anywhere Apps
• Huskies Get Hired
• Student Email
• Password Self-Service

Advanced Search

• Quick Links
• Photographs
• Illustrations & Pictures
• Songs & Sheet Music
• Manuscripts
• Articles & Clippings
• Video Recordings
• Nickels and Dimes: Dime Novels From the Collections of Johannsen and LeBlanc
• Lee Schreiner Sheet Music Collection
• 1962 World Science Fiction Collection
• 125th Anniversary Oral History Project
• Norther Yearbooks
• Northern Illinois
• Golden Anniversary Project
• NIU-DeKalb Community Black Oral History Project
• Peace Corps Training for Thailand
• W. W. Embree Collection
• World War I & II Poster Collection
• Browse all collections
• Southeast Asia Digital Library
• Latinx Oral History Project
• Ritzman Photo Collection
• Mark Twain's Mississippi
• Lincoln/Net
• Illinois During the Gilded Age
• American Archives
• Illinois During the Civil War
• Projects & Grants
• Get Involved
• Digitization Request
• Copyright & Usage
• Digitization Guidelines
• Collection Development Policy
• Digital Preservation Policy
• Digital Preservation Implementation Plan

Mark Twain's Mississippi

• Primary Source Materials

Mark Twain's Biography

by Gregg Camfield, PhD, University of California-Merced

On November 30, 1835, nearly thirty years before he took the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, a hamlet some 130 miles north-northwest of St. Louis, and 30 miles inland from the Mississippi River. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had earlier that year moved the family there from Tennessee. In Tennessee, he had accumulated much land, a pair of slaves, a wife, and five children, but his efforts as a lawyer, storekeeper, and local politician did not yield the wealth he desired. Like many of his contemporaries, he decided that the way to a fortunate future was to move west. His brother-in-law, John Quarles, had established a farm in the new hamlet of Florida and invited John Marshall Clemens, his wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, and their brood of children to the new country.

Trained to be a country lawyer, John Marshall was no farmer, and even though Americans were extraordinarily litigious, it would take time (and denser population) to build a law practice that could support a family. He fell back on keeping store, and again did not thrive. Given that the river was where a merchant had access to markets, John Marshall moved his family to the as-yet-unincorporated town of Hannibal, about 30 miles east-northeast of Florida. There, too, his business ventures, in his dry-goods store, in his land dealings, even in his efforts to trade slaves, did not prosper. The family found itself slipping toward poverty — so desperate, in fact, that they had to sell off their furniture — before finally, John Marshall's political ambitions ended in his election to justice of the peace. While the fees he earned in this office were not enough to make the family's fortunes, they were the difference between poverty and a competence. Yet with fortunes finally looking up, John Marshall Clemens took ill and died in 1847. The remaining Clemens family (mother Jane, sister Pamela, and brothers Orion, Samuel, and Henry) had to make their way by hook and crook. Orion was already off in St. Louis, working as a journeyman printer. The wages he sent home kept the family afloat. Within a year, however, young Samuel could no longer afford the luxuries of childhood, school and play. Instead, he began his first apprenticeship, to Hannibal printer William Ament, publisher of the grandly named Missouri Courier.

In working for Ament, Sam learned about printing, the first mass production industry, almost as it had been practiced from the beginning. In a country print shop, a printer had to do everything from the editorial side, to type setting, to press-work, to distributing the finished product. There was no division of labor, and only hints of the industrial revolution. Yet brother Orion in St. Louis was working in a major print shop, as a compositor rather than as a printer. Orion, in keeping with craft guild principles, wanted to be his own master, so in 1851, he returned to Hannibal, bought one of the other Hannibal newspapers, the equally grandly named Western Union, and took on his younger brothers Samuel and Henry as his apprentices. He soon combined his struggling newspaper with the Hannibal Journal, but even a merger could not turn a local paper into a good living, especially for an owner whose politics were not fully congenial to Hannibal.

Neither younger brother much appreciated working for their quirky older brother. Orion fancied himself to be a new Benjamin Franklin, and used to badger his younger brothers with Franklin's aphorisms about industry, efficiency, temperance, and frugality. The frugality was imposed by the fact that such old-fashioned printing was not lucrative, even when it was a central part of the social fabric of the American small town. Young Samuel accepted the push toward industry and temperance, even as younger brother Henry rebelled by being lazy and sloppy in his work. Orion's response to Henry's poor work was often to put more on Samuel. Naturally, Sam came to resent his position, too. In 1853, he bolted, heading first for St. Louis to work as a typesetter, then heading out of the Mississippi Valley for the first time to work as a typesetter in a number of eastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

His correspondence home shows how much he accepted his responsibility to his mother, promising her a portion of his wages, yet his contact with the new industrial economy of the big cities prevented him from making much financial progress in his work. Demoralized that he was unable to make his fortune, he rejoined his family, which, in the interim, had also abandoned Hannibal. His sister had already moved to St. Louis when in 1851 she married William A. Moffet, a successful merchant. His brother Orion had sold his Hannibal print shop to move to Muscatine, Iowa, to free soil, where his abolitionist ideas were neither a threat to his livelihood nor his health. Samuel at this point did not oppose slavery; his attitudes were shaped primarily by those held by his Missouri neighbors, especially by his father and his Uncle Quarles. While his father never had many slaves, and in financial exigency had been forced to sell, he had helped uphold slavery in Missouri. His uncle was a farmer whose success depended not only on his own work, but on the labor of his slaves. In the years before he began his apprenticeship, Sam had spent many summers on the Quarles farm. But Orion's time in St. Louis had put him in touch with organized labor which, though often quite racist in its outlook, was opposed to slave labor as a system that undercut wages. When he moved to Iowa at the very end of 1853, he became active in anti-slavery politics, leading him ultimately to working for Lincoln's election in 1860.

Sam's return to the Mississippi Valley in late spring of 1854 was not a return to his childhood home. Now living in a free state, but with strong family ties to Missouri, his return to work for his brother was a stop-gap. Indeed, late in that year and early in 1855, he worked in St. Louis before returning to Muscatine. In 1856, he left home again, this time for a stint of typesetting in Cincinnati. Itinerant as always, Clemens was but briefly satisfied in Cincinnati, and when on his way home in 1857, he decided, instead, to change careers to become a riverboat pilot. In order to do so, he had to pay $500, half up front, with the balance to be paid from his first wages when the apprenticeship was over. (Multiply these numbers by 25 to find a rough equivalent to today's dollars.) He had to borrow the down payment from his brother-in-law. Young Sam did not have good role models for how to spend money, but given how poor he was, the amount he was willing to borrow says something about how much he wanted to become a riverboat pilot.

Fictionalized slightly, “Old Times on the Mississippi” tells the story of this apprenticeship. With the addition of the story of his successful efforts to get his younger brother, Henry, a job on a steamboat and his younger brother's death in a steamboat accident, found in chapters 18-20 of Life on the Mississippi, Twain's own account of his days as an apprentice on a steamboat, and his account of the social and political circumstances of steam boating, is one of the best accounts of river life ever written. But he left off the tale at the end of his apprenticeship, telling us next to nothing about his brief, successful career in boating. When fully licensed as a pilot in the St. Louis to New Orleans trade, Sam Clemens found regular and lucrative employment, enabling him not only to pay off his debts and help support his mother, but also giving him enough extra income to indulge himself.

I can "bank" in the neighborhood of $100 a month . . . and that will satisfy me for the present . . . . Bless me! . . . what respect Prosperity commands. Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," [of the Western Boatmen's Benevolent Association] and receive only the customary fraternal greeting — but now they say, "Why how are you, old fellow — when did you get in?" And the young pilots who used to tell me, patronisingly, that I could never learn the river, cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. . . . I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions.

Not surprisingly, one of his chief indulgences was to speculate in commodities, buying and shipping them as he went up and down the river. True to family form, he lost money.

But his newfound wealth and the company he began to keep helped him leave his mother's and brother's world emotionally as well as physically. He was a chief player in an industry that was so modern and cosmopolitan that it figures in such stories as T.B. Thorpe's “The Big Bear of Arkansas” and Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, as a symbol of America: of its politics, its trade, its industry, its cultural and ethnic diversity, of its inexorable changes. His letters from the period show him indulging his restless spirit in taking advantage of the entertainments of two of America's great cities. From things as innocent as learning to dance, which according to his mother's strict religion encouraged sin, to learning to drink and curse, which were culturally normal but coming under regular attack in an evangelical and reformist age, Clemens explored behavior and attitudes that were new to him. And the powers of observation required of him as a pilot certainly helped him when he turned to journalism and then to writing novels, sketches, and stories.

Had the Civil War not interrupted the river trade, Samuel Clemens might have spent his life as a pilot, writing no more than an occasional newspaper squib. Clemens was not a hothead on either side, in part because his livelihood depended on commerce between the North and the South up and down the great riverway. In the election of 1860, Sam Clemens voted his bread and butter. Spurning both the Democratic Party and the new Republican Party, Clemens voted for the Constitutional Union Party's ticket of Bell and Everett. But when the war began, Clemens's vague leanings toward states' rights and slavery came out. First, he holed up with his sister's family in St. Louis, fearing that he would be impressed as a pilot for Union transport or gun boats. Then, in the late spring of 1861, he answered the call of the states' rights leaning Missouri Governor, C.F. Jackson, to form militias to “repel the invader.” Technically, Missouri never joined the Confederacy, so Clemens's brief stint as an irregular soldier cannot be classified as time as a Confederate soldier, but given that Clemens and his fellow militia-men knew full well that they were to fight against the troops of the United States Army, such semantic distinctions are unimportant. What is important, is that Clemens was not confident enough of his actions to let his brother Orion know of them.

The Civil War radically transformed the nation and many of the lives in it, and that was almost as true for Sam Clemens as it was for so many others. Sam Clemens planned to pass the few months the War was expected to last out West, living off his savings while prospecting for silver and gold. As the War dragged on, his savings ran out. He did not strike it rich, and facing poverty again, he returned to the printing industry, this time on the editorial side. In part because he was a talented writer and in part because he was well connected politically, he was hired by the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise to be a reporter. There he served yet another apprenticeship, this time in literary work. There he first used his famous pen name, “Mark Twain,” derived from his days on the River. The call “Mark Twain” means, literally, “at this point, two,” meaning that at a given point, the river is two fathoms (twelve feet) deep. This was the usual depth for safe passage for a Mississippi River steamboat. (Though in Virginia City, some of his friends interpreted “Mark Twain” to stand for Clemens's tendency to order two drinks at a time and mark them on his bar tab.) There he began to work as a roving reporter, and the reputation he earned in Nevada expanded until newspapers from California to New York sent him all over the world to report on politics, the arts, fashion, commerce — anything that would entertain or inform readers. His life as a reporter and then as a belletristic writer led him to make his home in Nevada, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut, England, Germany, France, and Italy, but never again in the Mississippi Valley.

While the War started a chain of events that removed Samuel Clemens physically from the Mississippi Valley, it did not remove him imaginatively. If anything, the War also forced Clemens to rethink what he believed. As he put it in a letter to his Missouri friend Jacob H. Burrough in a 1 November 1876 letter,

As you describe me I can picture myself as I was, twenty-two years of age. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug . . . . Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness . . . . That is what I was at 19-20; & that is what the average Southerner is at 60 to-day.

The process that began in 1860 did not end until he died in 1910, and in his imagination he revisited the Mississippi Valley incessantly, in one literary work after another, including The Gilded Age (1871) “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1874), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893), a series of sequels to the Tom and Huck stories, and in “Chapters from My Autobiography.”

Biography Online

Mark Twain Biography

Early life of Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens (later better known by his pen name Mark Twain) was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835 to the son of a Tennessee country merchant. Twain was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the great Mississippi River. At the age of 11, his father died and the next year Twain had to gain employment as a printer’s apprentice. From an early age, he began contributing articles and humorous sketches to the Hannibal Journal. At the age of 18, he left Missouri and went to New York, Philadelphia and St Louis. He furthered his education in public libraries and became active in the print unions. He was a vocal supporter of organised labour throughout his life, seeing how businesses were in a position to offer poor conditions and low pay to workers.

In 1859, he became a river pilot on the Mississippi River. It was a lucrative job with a salary of $250 a month. The job required great knowledge of the river which he assiduously gained.

By 1865, he had his first major publishing success – “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County “.  This was a humorous tall tale which brought him much success. The popular acclaim for this first publishing success led to further travelling opportunities including a tour of Europe and the Middle East. This journey gave him material for his humorous travel diary – ‘ The Innocents Abroad’  ( 1869). Humour was an important element in Twain’s writings and speeches.

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.” (1899)

Twain’s quick wit helped to make him one of the most famous Americans of his generation.

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”

― Mark Twain

In 1870, Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon. Olivia came from a wealthy and liberal NY family, who cultivated a wide circle of liberal and progressive activists. Through his wife, he met people such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and utopian socialist William Dean Howells. It was a very different society to the conservative slave state of Missouri where he had been brought up. He also became friendly with Helen Keller ; Twain was instrumental in helping to finance Keller’s education and was deeply impressed by her courage in overcoming her deafblindness.

Twain noted that he became more radical as his life progressed. He said that after an initial spell of enthusiasm for imperialism he became very suspicious of imperialist motives, e.g., he was critical of American intervention in the Philippines. Twain became vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1901 until his death in 1910.

Twain was also a staunch supporter of abolition and black emancipation. He said that Lincoln’s Proclamation ‘Not only set the black slaves free but set the white man free also.’

The early works of Twain were generally light-hearted and humorous. However, as his writing and life developed, his books and articles increasingly became more serious and focused on the pressing social issues facing America.

“I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

Harper’s Magazine , Sept. 1899

With the same deft touch and comic turn, Twain became a satirist on the cruelties and injustice of mankind and gave vent to his deeply held beliefs.

It is Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which are considered Twain’s greatest achievements. Hemingway later wrote that:

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

After working briefly for the Buffalo Express newspaper, Twain took his family and three daughters to live in Hartford, Connecticut. The family lived there for 17 years, and this gave Mark Twain a firm base to devote himself to writing. It was here that he wrote his best-known books – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1864 ) As his fame and profile grew, Twain gained a substantial income through his writing. However, unfortunately, he lost a small fortune through a misplaced investment in the Paige typesetting machines. He is estimated to have lost $300,000 before it was made obsolete by the newly developed Linotype.

Combined with money lost through his own publishing house, Twain faced bankruptcy but was saved with the help of financier Henry Rogers. Twain then worked hard – undertaking a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts in full.

Despite a successful writing career and worldwide fame – which included an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford – Twain suffered depression from painful personal tragedies. At an early age, Twain lost his first son. But, it was the death of his daughter, Sudsy, in 1896, which brought about an onset of real depression. This was further complicated by the death of his wife, Olivia in 1901.

Twain and Religion

“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian”

– Mark Twain

Twain wrote many articles on religion – many of which weren’t published during his lifetime because they were considered too critical of religion. Twain criticised many aspects of organised religion and Christianity. He indicated that he believed in a God, but not in messages and revelations, which people often claimed came from God. His exact views are not precise as he expressed different opinions at different times. He was brought up a Presbyterian and later helped build a Presbyterian church for his brother.

Even as he approached the end of his life, Twain remained as witty as ever. A much-repeated quote in full is:

“James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Twain also satirised aspects of the Gilded Age of America – the unbridled pursuit of material wealth through corrupt and monopoly practices. In 1973, he wrote (with Charles Dudley Warner) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The book was Twain’s only collaboration, and although not too well known, the title came to describe the whole era of corruption and greed that epitomised aspects of America in the late Nineteenth Century.

Twain died on April 21st, 1910 from a heart attack – one day after Hailey’s Comet closest approach to earth. (Twain had been born close to Hailey Comet’s previous approach to earth in 1835.) In fact, in 1909, Twain had predicted he would die in close to proximity to the return of Hailey’s Comet.

As well as being a writer, Mark Twain had a fascination with science. He developed three inventions which gained patents; this included a self-pasting scrapbook.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Mark Twain ”, Oxford, UK  www.biographyonline.net Published 21st February 2010. Updated 8th February 2018.

Mark Twain: Collection of short stories

Mark Twain: Collection of short stories at Amazon

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at Amazon

 Related pages

• Mark Twain Quotes

Mark Twain: His Life and His Humor

• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Study Guides
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• MLA, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens Nov. 30, 1835 in the small town of Florida, MO, and raised in Hannibal, became one of the greatest American authors of all time. Known for his sharp wit and pithy commentary on society, politics, and the human condition, his many essays and novels, including the American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , are a testament to his intelligence and insight. Using humor and satire to soften the edges of his keen observations and critiques, he revealed in his writing some of the injustices and absurdities of society and human existence, his own included. He was a humorist, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, lecturer, iconic celebrity (who always wore white at his lectures), political satirist, and social progressive .

He died on April 21, 1910 when Halley’s Comet was again visible in the night sky, as lore would have it, just as it had been when he was born 75 years earlier. Wryly and presciently, Twain had said, “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), 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 a heart attack one day after the Comet appeared its brightest in 1910.

A complex, idiosyncratic person, he never liked to be introduced by someone else when lecturing, preferring instead to introduce himself as he did when beginning the following lecture, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” in 1866:

“Ladies and gentlemen: The next lecture in this course will be delivered this evening, by Samuel L. Clemens, a gentleman whose high character and unimpeachable integrity are only equalled by his comeliness of person and grace of manner. And I am the man! I was obliged to excuse the chairman from introducing me, because he never compliments anybody and I knew I could do it just as well.”

Twain was  a complicated mixture of southern boy and western ruffian striving to fit into elite Yankee culture. He wrote in his speech, Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,1881 :

“I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.”

Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri had a lasting influence on Twain, and working as a steamboat captain for several years before the Civil War was one of his greatest pleasures. While riding the steamboat he would observe the many passengers, learning much about their character and affect. His time working as a miner and a journalist in Nevada and California during the 1860s introduced him to the rough and tumble ways of the west, which is where, Feb. 3, 1863, he first used the pen name, Mark Twain, when writing one of his humorous essays for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in Nevada.

Mark Twain was a riverboat term that means two fathoms, the point at which it is safe for the boat to navigate the waters. It seems that when Samuel Clemens adopted this pen name he also adopted another persona - a persona that represented the outspoken commoner, poking fun at the aristocrats in power, while Samuel Clemens, himself, strove to be one of them.

Twain got his first big break as a writer in 1865 with an article about life in a mining camp, called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog , also called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County . It was very favorably received and printed in newspapers and magazines all over the country. From there he received other jobs, sent to Hawaii, and then to Europe and the Holy Land as a travel writer. Out of these travels he wrote the book, The Innocents Abroad , in 1869, which became a bestseller. His books and essays were generally so well-regarded that he started lecturing and promoting them, becoming popular both as a writer and a speaker.

When he married Olivia Langdon in 1870, he married into a wealthy family from Elmira, New York and moved east to Buffalo, NY and then to Hartford, CT where he collaborated with the Hartford Courant Publisher to co-write The Gilded Age, a satirical novel about greed and corruption among the wealthy after the Civil War. Ironically, this was also the society to which he aspired and gained entry. But Twain had his share of losses, too - loss of fortune investing in failed inventions (and failing to invest in successful ones such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone ), and the deaths of people he loved, such as his younger brother in a riverboat accident, for which he felt responsible, and several of his children and his beloved wife.

Although Twain survived, thrived, and made a living out of humor, his humor was borne out of sorrow, a complicated view of life, an understanding of life’s contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities.  As he once said, “ There is no laughter in heaven .” 

Mark Twain’s style of humor was wry, pointed, memorable, and delivered in a slow drawl. Twain’s humor carried on the tradition of humor of the Southwest, consisting of tall tales, myths, and frontier sketches, informed by his experiences growing up in Hannibal, MO, as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and as a gold miner and journalist in Nevada and California.

In 1863 Mark Twain attended in Nevada the lecture of Artemus Ward (pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne,1834-1867), one of America’s best-known humorists of the 19th century. They became friends, and Twain learned much from him about how to make people laugh. Twain believed that how a story was told was what made it funny  - repetition, pauses, and an air of naivety.

In his essay How to Tell a Story Twain says, “There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one.” He describes what makes a story funny, and what distinguishes the American story from that of the English or French; namely that the American story is humorous, the English is comic, and the French is witty.

He explains how they differ:

“The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is strictly a work of art, — high and delicate art, — and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story —- understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print — was created in America, and has remained at home.”

Other important characteristics of a good humorous story, according to Twain, include the following:

• A humorous story is told gravely, as though there is nothing funny about it.
• The story is told wanderingly and the point is “slurred.”
• A “studied remark” is made as if without even knowing it, “as if one were thinking aloud.”
• The pause: “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less—or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended—and then you can't surprise them, of course.”

Twain believed in telling a story in an understated way, almost as if he was letting his audience in on a secret. He cites a story, The Wounded Soldier , as an example and to explain the difference in the different manners of storytelling, explaining that:

 “The American would conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it…. the American tells it in a ‘rambling and disjointed’ fashion and pretends that he does not know that it is funny at all,” whereas “The European ‘tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.” ….”All of which,” Mark Twain sadly comments, “is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.”

Twain’s folksy, irreverent, understated style of humor, use of vernacular language, and seemingly forgetful rambling prose and strategic pauses drew his audience in, making them seem smarter than he. His intelligent satirical wit, impeccable timing, and ability to subtly poke fun at both himself and the elite made him accessible to a wide audience, and made him one of the most successful comedians of his time and one that has had a lasting influence on future comics and humorists.

Humor was absolutely essential to Mark Twain, helping him navigate life just as he learned to navigate the Mississippi when a young man, reading the depths and nuances of the human condition like he learned to see the subtleties and complexities of the river beneath its surface. He learned to create humor out of confusion and absurdity, bringing laughter into the lives of others as well. He once said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

MARK TWAIN PRIZE

Twain was much admired during his lifetime and recognized as an American icon. A  prize created in his honor, The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the nation’s top comedy honor, has been given annually since 1998 to “people who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th century novelist and essayist best known as Mark Twain.” Previous recipients of the prize have included some of the most notable humorists of our time. The 2017 prizewinner is David Letterman, who according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times writer , “Like Mark Twain …distinguished himself as a cockeyed, deadpan observer of American behavior and, later in life, for his prodigious and distinctive facial hair. Now the two satirists share a further connection.”

One can only wonder what remarks Mark Twain would make today about our government, ourselves, and the absurdities of our world. But undoubtedly they would be insightful and humorous to help us “stand against the assault” and perhaps even give us pause.

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-x_k7zrPUw
• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1arrRQJkA28
• Mark Twain , http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/index.php/about/biography/
• Mark Twain , history.com , http://www.history.com/topics/mark-twain
• Railton, Stephen and University of Virginia Library, Mark Twain In His Times , http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/about/mtabout.html
• Mark Twain’s Interactive Scrapbook, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/index.html
• Mark Twain’s America , IMAX,, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0WioOn8Tkw (Video)
• Middlekauff, Robert, Mark Twain’s Humor - With Examples , https://amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/150305.pdf
• Moss, Walter, Mark Twain’s Progressive and Prophetic Political Humor, http://hollywoodprogressive.com/mark-twain/
• The Mark Twain House and Museum , https://www.marktwainhouse.org/man/biography_main.php

For Teachers :

• Learn More About Mark Twain , PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/index.html
• Lesson 1: Mark Twain and American Humor, National Endowment for the Humanities, https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/mark-twain-and-american-humor#sect-introduction
• Lesson Plan | Mark Twain and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor , WGBH, PBS, https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/773460a8-d817-4fbd-9c1e-15656712348e/lesson-plan-mark-twain-and-the-mark-twain-prize-for-american-humor/#.WT2Y_DMfn-Y
• Mark Twain's Feel for Language and Locale Brings His Stories to Life
• The Story of Samuel Clemens as "Mark Twain"
• A Closer Look at "A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain's Colloquial Prose Style
• Reading Quiz: 'Two Ways of Seeing a River' by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain's Views on Enslavement
• The Meaning of the Pseudonym Mark Twain
• Quotes from Mark Twain, Master of Sarcasm
• Definition and Examples of Humorous Essays
• What Were Mark Twain's Inventions?
• Two Ways of Seeing a River
• A Photo Tour of the Mark Twain House in Connecticut
• Mark Twain & Death
• A Fable by Mark Twain
• 'Life on the Mississippi' Quotes
• Who's the Real Huckleberry Finn?

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: April 5, 2010

The name Mark Twain is a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Moffit Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings. Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. When Jane Clemens was in her 80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: “I suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?” “Yes, the whole time,” she answered. “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” “No,” she said, “afraid you would.”

Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. John Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida , Mo., to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal , where there were greater opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more. In the meantime, the debts accumulated. Still, John Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s (some 70,000 acres [28,000 hectares]) might one day make them wealthy, and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. Late in his life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse:

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent.…It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Judging from his own speculative ventures in silver mining, business, and publishing, it was a curse that Sam Clemens never quite outgrew.

Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), the village was a “white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock’s Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the second became McDougal’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, Mo., where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic (potentially lethal in those days) was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. In 1847 Clemens’s father died of pneumonia. John Clemens’s death contributed further to the family’s financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity. Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. One evening in 1844 Clemens discovered a corpse in his father’s office; it was the body of a California emigrant who had been stabbed in a quarrel and was placed there for the inquest. In January 1845 Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn. Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. As it turned out, Tom Blankenship’s older brother Bence had been secretly taking food to the runaway slave for some weeks before the slave was apparently discovered and killed. Bence’s act of courage and kindness served in some measure as a model for Huck’s decision to help the fugitive Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printer’s apprentice for Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.

Apprenticeships

In 1850 the oldest Clemens boy, Orion, returned from St. Louis, Mo., and began to publish a weekly newspaper. A year later he bought the Hannibal Journal, and Sam and his younger brother Henry worked for him. Sam became more than competent as a typesetter, but he also occasionally contributed sketches and articles to his brother’s paper. Some of those early sketches, such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter (1852), appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals. In 1852, acting as the substitute editor while Orion was out of town, Clemens signed a sketch “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins.” This was his first known use of a pseudonym, and there would be several more ( Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, Josh, and others) before he adopted, permanently, the pen name Mark Twain.

Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer, trying many occupations. It was not until he was 37, he once remarked, that he woke up to discover he had become a “literary person.” In the meantime, he was intent on seeing the world and exploring his own possibilities. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington , D.C.; then he returned to New York, only to find work hard to come by because of fires that destroyed two publishing houses. During his time in the East, which lasted until early 1854, he read widely and took in the sights of these cities. He was acquiring, if not a worldly air, at least a broader perspective than that offered by his rural background. And Clemens continued to write, though without firm literary ambitions, occasionally publishing letters in his brother’s new newspaper. Orion had moved briefly to Muscatine, Iowa , with their mother, where he had established the Muscatine Journal before relocating to Keokuk, Iowa, and opening a printing shop there. Sam Clemens joined his brother in Keokuk in 1855 and was a partner in the business for a little over a year, but he then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio , to work as a typesetter. Still restless and ambitious, he booked passage in 1857 on a steamboat bound for New Orleans , La., planning to find his fortune in South America. Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice.

Having agreed to pay a $500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, with an eye toward obtaining a pilot’s license. (Clemens paid Bixby $100 down and promised to pay the remainder of the substantial fee in installments, something he evidently never managed to do.) Bixby did indeed “learn”—a word Twain insisted on—him the river, but the young man was an apt pupil as well. Because Bixby was an exceptional pilot and had a license to navigate the Missouri River and the upper as well as the lower Mississippi, lucrative opportunities several times took him upstream. On those occasions, Clemens was transferred to other veteran pilots and thereby learned the profession more quickly and thoroughly than he might have otherwise. The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed. Not only did a pilot receive good wages and enjoy universal respect, but he was absolutely free and self-sufficient: “a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth,” he wrote. Clemens enjoyed the rank and dignity that came with the position; he belonged, both informally and officially, to a group of men whose acceptance he cherished; and—by virtue of his membership in the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, obtained soon after he earned his pilot’s license in 1859—he participated in a true “meritocracy” of the sort he admired and would dramatize many years later in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Clemens’s years on the river were eventful in other ways. He met and fell in love with Laura Wright, eight years his junior. The courtship dissolved in a misunderstanding, but she remained the remembered sweetheart of his youth. He also arranged a job for his younger brother Henry on the riverboat Pennsylvania . The boilers exploded, however, and Henry was fatally injured. Clemens was not on board when the accident occurred, but he blamed himself for the tragedy. His experience as a cub and then as a full-fledged pilot gave him a sense of discipline and direction he might never have acquired elsewhere. Before this period his had been a directionless knockabout life; afterward he had a sense of determined possibility. He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch, River Intelligence (1859), lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper. Clemens and the other “starchy boys,” as he once described his fellow riverboat pilots in a letter to his wife, had no particular use for this nonunion man, but Clemens did envy what he later recalled to be Sellers’s delicious pen name, Mark Twain.

The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license. He returned to Hannibal, where he joined the prosecessionist Marion Rangers, a ragtag lot of about a dozen men. After only two uneventful weeks, during which the soldiers mostly retreated from Union troops rumoured to be in the vicinity, the group disbanded. A few of the men joined other Confederate units, and the rest, along with Clemens, scattered. Twain would recall this experience, a bit fuzzily and with some fictional embellishments, in The Private History of the Campaign That Failed (1885). In that memoir he extenuated his history as a deserter on the grounds that he was not made for soldiering. Like the fictional Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he was to publish in 1885, Clemens then lit out for the territory. Huck Finn intends to escape to the Indian country, probably Oklahoma ; Clemens accompanied his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory.

Clemens’s own political sympathies during the war are obscure. It is known at any rate that Orion Clemens was deeply involved in Republican Party politics and in Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemens’s association with Orion did not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once again, he had to shift for himself—mining and investing in timber and silver and gold stocks, oftentimes “prospectively rich,” but that was all. Clemens submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter. He was again embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he succeeded.

The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak production in the late 1870s. Nearby Virginia City was known for its gambling and dance halls, its breweries and whiskey mills, its murders, riots, and political corruption. Years later Twain recalled the town in a public lecture: “It was no place for a Presbyterian,” he said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he added, “And I did not remain one very long.” Nevertheless, he seems to have retained something of his moral integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. This was a dangerous indulgence, for violent retribution was not uncommon.

In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them “Mark Twain.” Apparently the mistranscription of a telegram misled Clemens to believe that the pilot Isaiah Sellers had died and that his cognomen was up for grabs. Clemens seized it. (See Researcher’s Note: Origins of the name Mark Twain.) It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a “literary person.”

Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. In 1864, after challenging the editor of a rival newspaper to a duel and then fearing the legal consequences for this indiscretion, he left Virginia City for San Francisco and became a full-time reporter for the Call. Finding that work tiresome, he began contributing to the Golden Era and the new literary magazine the Californian, edited by Bret Harte. After he published an article expressing his fiery indignation at police corruption in San Francisco, and after a man with whom he associated was arrested in a brawl, Clemens decided it prudent to leave the city for a time. He went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog arrived too late to be included in the volume, but it was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity, and Sam Clemens was following in his wake.

Literary Maturity

The next few years were important for Clemens. After he had finished writing the jumping-frog story but before it was published, he declared in a letter to Orion that he had a “ ‘call’ to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of,” he continued, “but it is my strongest suit.” However much he might deprecate his calling, it appears that he was committed to making a professional career for himself. He continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he needed money. Meanwhile, he tried, unsuccessfully, to publish a book made up of his letters from Hawaii. His first book was in fact The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), but it did not sell well. That same year, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. He had ambitions to enlarge his reputation and his audience, and the announcement of a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land provided him with just such an opportunity. The Alta paid the substantial fare in exchange for some 50 letters he would write concerning the trip. Eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad (1869). It was a great success.

The trip abroad was fortuitous in another way. He met on the boat a young man named Charlie Langdon, who invited Clemens to dine with his family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia; the writer fell in love with her. Clemens’s courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, N.Y., was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870. With financial assistance from Olivia’s father, Clemens bought a one-third interest in the Express of Buffalo, N.Y., and began writing a column for a New York City magazine, the Galaxy. A son, Langdon, was born in November 1870, but the boy was frail and would die of diphtheria less than two years later. Clemens came to dislike Buffalo and hoped that he and his family might move to the Nook Farm area of Hartford, Conn. In the meantime, he worked hard on a book about his experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and sold well. The next month, Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens was born in Elmira. Later that year, Clemens traveled to England. Upon his return, he began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel about political and financial corruption in the United States. The Gilded Age (1873) was remarkably well received, and a play based on the most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became quite popular.

The Gilded Age was Twain’s first attempt at a novel, and the experience was apparently congenial enough for him to begin writing Tom Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. He also published A True Story, a moving dialect sketch told by a former slave, in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in 1874. A second daughter, Clara, was born in June, and the Clemenses moved into their still-unfinished house in Nook Farm later the same year, counting among their neighbours Warner and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe . Old Times on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. The obscure journalist from the wilds of California and Nevada had arrived: he had settled down in a comfortable house with his family; he was known worldwide; his books sold well, and he was a popular favourite on the lecture tour; and his fortunes had steadily improved over the years. In the process, the journalistic and satirical temperament of the writer had, at times, become retrospective. Old Times, which would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit ruefully too, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was coloured by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a “hymn” to childhood. The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer (it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print) indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his comrades—including pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cave—continue to delight children, while the book’s comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.

In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck’s own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885. During that interval, Twain often turned his attention to other projects, only to return again and again to the novel’s manuscript.

Twain believed he had humiliated himself before Boston’s literary worthies when he delivered one of many speeches at a dinner commemorating the 70th birthday of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Twain’s contribution to the occasion fell flat (perhaps because of a failure of delivery or the contents of the speech itself), and some believed he had insulted three literary icons in particular: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes . The embarrassing experience may have in part prompted his removal to Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad (1880), about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for “young people of all ages.” In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby, taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi (1883). All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments, the most disastrous of which was the continued financial support of an inventor, James W. Paige, who was perfecting an automatic typesetting machine. In 1884 Clemens founded his own publishing company, bearing the name of his nephew and business agent, Charles L. Webster, and embarked on a four-month lecture tour with fellow author George W. Cable, both to raise money for the company and to promote the sales of Huckleberry Finn. Not long after that, Clemens began the first of several Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn. All the Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Huck’s voice. What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization. Through Huck, the novel’s narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.

For a time, Clemens’s prospects seemed rosy. After working closely with Ulysses S. Grant , he watched as his company’s publication of the former U.S. president’s memoirs in 1885–86 became an overwhelming success. Clemens believed a forthcoming biography of Pope Leo XIII would do even better. The prototype for the Paige typesetter also seemed to be working splendidly. It was in a generally sanguine mood that he began to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, about the exploits of a practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. So confident was he about prospects for the typesetter that Clemens predicted this novel would be his “swan-song” to literature and that he would live comfortably off the profits of his investment.

Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company was floundering, and cash flow problems meant he was drawing on his royalties to provide capital for the business. Clemens was suffering from rheumatism in his right arm, but he continued to write for magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and by 1891 he had ceased his monthly payments to support work on the Paige typesetter, effectively giving up on an investment that over the years had cost him some $200,000 or more. He closed his beloved house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail, might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. Luckily, he was befriended by a Standard Oil executive, Henry Huttleston Rogers, who undertook to put Clemens’s financial house in order. Clemens assigned his property, including his copyrights, to Olivia, announced the failure of his publishing house, and declared personal bankruptcy. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and to remake his career.

Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twain’s thoughts on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life. One of the maxims from that novel jocularly expresses his point of view: “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Clearly, despite his reversal of fortunes, Twain had not lost his sense of humour. But he was frustrated too—frustrated by financial difficulties but also by the public’s perception of him as a funnyman and nothing more. The persona of Mark Twain had become something of a curse for Samuel Clemens.

Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (serialized 1895–96), anonymously in hopes that the public might take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was the author; when the novel was first published in book form, in 1896, his name appeared on the volume’s spine but not on its title page. However, in later years he would publish some works anonymously, and still others he declared could not be published until long after his death, on the largely erroneous assumption that his true views would scandalize the public. Clemens’s sense of wounded pride was necessarily compromised by his indebtedness, and he embarked on a lecture tour in July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C., Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in England a little more than a year afterward. Clemens was in London when he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis. A pall settled over the Clemens household; they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work. He wrote a great deal he did not intend to publish during those years, but he did publish Following the Equator (1897), a relatively serious account of his world lecture tour. By 1898 the revenue generated from the tour and the subsequent book, along with Henry Huttleston Rogers’s shrewd investments of his money, had allowed Clemens to pay his creditors in full. Rogers was shrewd as well in the way he publicized and redeemed the reputation of “Mark Twain” as a man of impeccable moral character. Palpable tokens of public approbation are the three honorary degrees conferred on Clemens in his last years—from Yale University in 1901, from the University of Missouri in 1902, and, the one he most coveted, from Oxford University in 1907. When he traveled to Missouri to receive his honorary Doctor of Laws, he visited old friends in Hannibal along the way. He knew that it would be his last visit to his hometown.

Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger. (None of the manuscripts was ever completed, and they were posthumously combined and published in 1916.) He also started What Is Man? (published anonymously in 1906), a dialogue in which a wise “Old Man” converts a resistant “Young Man” to a brand of philosophical determinism. He began to dictate his autobiography, which he would continue to do until a few months before he died. Some of Twain’s best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt: an essay against anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews (1899); a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man Sitting in Darkness (1901); an essay on lynching, The United States of Lyncherdom (posthumously published in 1923); and a pamphlet on the brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905).

Clemens’s last years have been described as his “bad mood” period. The description may or may not be apt. It is true that in his polemical essays and in much of his fiction during this time he was venting powerful moral feelings and commenting freely on the “damn’d human race.” But he had always been against sham and corruption, greed, cruelty, and violence. Even in his California days, he was principally known as the “Moralist of the Main” and only incidentally as the “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” It was not the indignation he was expressing during these last years that was new; what seemed to be new was the frequent absence of the palliative humour that had seasoned the earlier outbursts. At any rate, even though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, there was no particular reason for Clemens to be in a good mood.

The family, including Clemens himself, had suffered from one sort of ailment or another for a very long time. In 1896 his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy, and the search for a cure, or at least relief, had taken the family to different doctors throughout Europe. By 1901 his wife’s health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in 1902, and for a time Clemens was allowed to see her for only five minutes a day. Removing to Italy seemed to improve her condition, but that was only temporary. She died on June 5, 1904. Something of his affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is conveyed in the moving piece Eve’s Diary (1906). The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” Clemens had written a commemorative poem on the anniversary of Susy’s death, and Eve’s Diary serves the equivalent function for the death of his wife. He would have yet another occasion to publish his grief. His daughter Jean died on Dec. 24, 1909. The Death of Jean (1911) was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, “to keep my heart from breaking.”

It is true that Clemens was bitter and lonely during his last years. He took some solace in the grandfatherly friendships he established with young schoolgirls he called his “angelfish.” His “Angelfish Club” consisted of 10 to 12 girls who were admitted to membership on the basis of their intelligence, sincerity, and good will, and he corresponded with them frequently. In 1906–07 he published selected chapters from his ongoing autobiography in the North American Review. Judging from the tone of the work, writing his autobiography often supplied Clemens with at least a wistful pleasure. These writings and others reveal an imaginative energy and humorous exuberance that do not fit the picture of a wholly bitter and cynical man. He moved into his new house in Redding, Conn., in June 1908, and that too was a comfort. He had wanted to call it “Innocents at Home,” but his daughter Clara convinced him to name it “Stormfield,” after a story he had written about a sea captain who sailed for heaven but arrived at the wrong port. Extracts from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven was published in installments in Harper’s Magazine in 1907–08. It is an uneven but delightfully humorous story, one that critic and journalist H.L. Mencken ranked on a level with Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Little Bessie and Letters from the Earth (both published posthumously) were also written during this period, and, while they are sardonic, they are antically comic as well. Clemens thought Letters from the Earth was so heretical that it could never be published. However, it was published in a book by that name, along with other previously unpublished writings, in 1962, and it reinvigorated public interest in Twain’s serious writings. The letters did present unorthodox views—that God was something of a bungling scientist and human beings his failed experiment, that Christ, not Satan, devised hell, and that God was ultimately to blame for human suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy. Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man.

Clara Clemens married in October 1909 and left for Europe by early December. Jean died later that month. Clemens was too grief-stricken to attend the burial services, and he stopped working on his autobiography. Perhaps as an escape from painful memories, he traveled to Bermuda in January 1910. By early April he was having severe chest pains. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine joined him, and together they returned to Stormfield. Clemens died on April 21. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine (first published in full in 1995). Clearly, Clemens’s mind was on final things; just as clearly, he had not altogether lost his sense of humour. Among the pieces of advice he offered Paine, for when his turn to enter heaven arrived, was this: “Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in.” Clemens was buried in the family plot in Elmira, N.Y., alongside his wife, his son, and two of his daughters. Only Clara survived him.

Reputation and Assessment

Shortly after Clemens’s death, Howells published My Mark Twain (1910), in which he pronounced Samuel Clemens “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” Twenty-five years later Ernest Hemingway wrote in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Both compliments are grandiose and a bit obscure. For Howells, Twain’s significance was apparently social—the humorist, Howells wrote, spoke to and for the common American man and woman; he emancipated and dignified the speech and manners of a class of people largely neglected by writers (except as objects of fun or disapproval) and largely ignored by genteel America. For Hemingway, Twain’s achievement was evidently an aesthetic one principally located in one novel. For later generations, however, the reputation of and controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn largely eclipsed the vast body of Clemens’s substantial literary corpus: the novel has been dropped from some American schools’ curricula on the basis of its characterization of the slave Jim, which some regard as demeaning, and its repeated use of an offensive racial epithet.

As a humorist and as a moralist, Twain worked best in short pieces. Roughing It is a rollicking account of his adventures in the American West, but it is also seasoned with such exquisite yarns as Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral and The Story of the Old Ram; A Tramp Abroad is for many readers a disappointment, but it does contain the nearly perfect Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn. In A True Story, told in an African American dialect, Twain transformed the resources of the typically American humorous story into something serious and profoundly moving. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is relentless social satire; it is also the most formally controlled piece Twain ever wrote. The originality of the longer works is often to be found more in their conception than in their sustained execution. The Innocents Abroad is perhaps the funniest of all of Twain’s books, but it also redefined the genre of the travel narrative by attempting to suggest to the reader, as Twain wrote, “how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes.” Similarly, in Tom Sawyer, he treated childhood not as the achievement of obedience to adult authority but as a period of mischief-making fun and good-natured affection. Like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which he much admired, Huckleberry Finn rang changes on the picaresque novel that are of permanent interest.

Twain was not the first Anglo-American to treat the problems of race and racism in all their complexity, but, along with that of Herman Melville, his treatment remains of vital interest more than a hundred years later. His ability to swiftly and convincingly create a variety of fictional characters rivals that of Charles Dickens. Twain’s scalawags, dreamers, stalwarts, and toughs, his solicitous aunts, ambitious politicians, carping widows, false aristocrats, canny but generous slaves, sententious moralists, brave but misguided children, and decent but complicitous bystanders, his loyal lovers and friends, and his fractious rivals—these and many more constitute a virtual census of American types. And his mastery of spoken language, of slang and argot and dialect, gave these figures a voice. Twain’s democratic sympathies and his steadfast refusal to condescend to the lowliest of his creations give the whole of his literary production a point of view that is far more expansive, interesting, and challenging than his somewhat crusty philosophical speculations. Howells, who had known most of the important American literary figures of the 19th century and thought them to be more or less like one another, believed that Twain was unique. Twain will always be remembered first and foremost as a humorist, but he was a great deal more—a public moralist, popular entertainer, political philosopher, travel writer, and novelist. Perhaps it is too much to claim, as some have, that Twain invented the American point of view in fiction, but that such a notion might be entertained indicates that his place in American literary culture is secure.

Thomas V. Quirk

Mark Twain: Biography, Achievements, Major Works, & Facts

by World History Edu · October 6, 2021

Mark Twain – biography and achievements

This American humorist, novelist and lecturer produced some of the most important works in the history of modern literature. With more than twenty novels to his name, many of them well-received as well, Mark Twain thus became an influential public figure and one of the greatest American writers of all time. This notion is supported by American writer and 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature winner William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962), who described Twain as “the Father of American literature”.

World History Edu takes a quick look at the early life, education, career, achievements, and major facts about Mark Twain.

Mark Twain: Fast Facts

Real name : Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Date of birth : November 30, 1835

Birthplace : Florida, Missouri, U.S.

Died : April 21, 1910

Place of death : Redding, Connecticut

Buried : Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York, United States

Parents : John Marshall Clemens and Jane Clemens

Siblings :  Six, including Orion Clemens and Henry Clemens

Wife : Olivia Langdon (married in 1870; died in 1904)

Children : Langdon, Susy, Clara and Jean

Notable Works: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , The Prince and the Pauper , Tom Sawyer Abroad

Awards : Hall of Fame for Great Americans (1920)

Occupation : Humorist, novelist, public moralist, political philosopher, travel writer, publisher, and lecturer

What is Mark Twain most famous for?

The Florida, Missouri-born humorist and novelist is most famous for works such as the The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881).

Twain is also famous for penning the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a book which is sometimes called “The Great American Novel”. The book is a sequel to his other famous book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

With works such as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was also known for his mastery of spoken language, wit and satire.

How was Mark Twain educated?

His schooling ended when he was in the fifth grade because he took up an apprenticeship training at a printer’s shop. He also trained as a typesetter at his older brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal.

The lack of an advance formal education did nothing to inhibit his literary prowess as he educated himself in public libraries in Missouri.

What was Mark Twain’s childhood like?

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , age 15, better known by his pen name Mark Twain

Mark Twain was of English, Cornish and Scottish descent. He had six siblings; however only three made it past childhood. The three were Orion (1824-1897), Henry (1838-1858), and Pamela (1827-1904).

He was born in Florida, Missouri, but he spent much of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a port town that inspired the fictional place St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and later the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

What did Mark Twain write?

Mark Twain drew a lot of his material from his childhood experiences in Hannibal, Missouri. His inclination to infuse slavery into books like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stemmed from the fact that slavery was legal in Missouri during his childhood.

Mark Twain is famously known for his published works The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , and The Prince and the Pauper . He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, United States.

Birth and early life

Mark Twain’s Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) affectionately recounts his childhood memories in Hannibal.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain grew up with six siblings in Florida, Missouri. When he was around four years old, his family’s financial woes forced them to immigrate to Hannibal , a lively port town along the Mississippi River in the state of Missouri.

Twain, who was born two months prematurely, struggled for the first decade or so in his life. Many home therapies were used by his mother to give the young Twain some semblance of a normal life. His sickly nature meant that he was treated with somewhat of a kid’s glove. He is said to have had a knack for being mischievous child.

His mother Jane Clemens had the greatest impact on him as a child. He most likely got his sense of humor from his mother, not his father John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847). His father was quite a stern and serious parent, often times not displaying any kind of affection to the young Clemens or his siblings.

After moving to Hannibal, John Clemens set up a store; he would later go on to become a justice of the peace (i.e. a local magistrate). Hannibal was not very kind to the Clemens as their financial woes continued. His family penned a great deal of hope on a 70,000-acre land in Tennessee, hoping it would be their ticket to stable lifestyle. As Twain would later write, the land ended up being a bad investment like many other speculative ventures of his father’s.

As a child, Twain’s active imagination was evident right from the get go. He and his friends would act out stories from many fabled adventures, including Robin Hood. Often times, he would visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave and go swimming in the river near Glasscock’s Island. In his book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , the island becomes Jackson’s Island.

During the summer holidays, Twain would spend time at his uncle John Quarles’ farm in Florida, Missouri, where he have a great deal of fun with his cousins. As kids, they would listen to the captivating stories told by a slave called Uncle Daniel, a man who Twain transformed into the character Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

His childhood experiences with friend Tom Blankenship was the inspiration for his book character Huckleberry Finn.

Tragedies suffered during his childhood

It was not all fun and sunshine during his childhood. Twain had his fair share of personal losses. One of his siblings, Margaret, succumbed to a disease when Twain was still toddler. His brother Benjamin died when Twain was around seven years old. Then, at the age of eight, he acquired measles during the epidemic. His childhood was also marred by the cholera epidemic that claimed the lives of over 20 people in the town. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of his childhood came in 1847, when his father, John Clemens, passed away due to pneumonia.

The death of his father further exacerbated the family’s financial problems. The family was forced to sell a great deal of their possessions, including the only slave, Jennie, they owned. Yes! Mark Twain’s family, who lived in the slave state of Missouri, owned a slave. It was the mid-1850s; slavery hadn’t been abolished at time. As a kid, Twain was told by his elders that slaves were chattel that God sanctioned for people to own. In his adult years, Twain struggled to with the guilt and shame of his family’s possession of a slave.

The port town of Hannibal, Missouri, also had its fair share of violent activities that left a scar on the mind of the young Clemens. He once saw a man gunned down a Hannibal merchant. He was also shocked by level of abuse slaves in Missouri endured at the hands of their owners. One time, he and his friends, while playing in the river, found a dead slave body floating in the river.

Authors and works that influenced Mark Twain

Growing up, Samuel Clemens was influenced by writers such as Scottish poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and American author and novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). The latter author was most famous for writing novels of frontier adventure, including The Pioneers (1823) and The Pathfinder (1840).

During his writing career, Mark Twain, being an excellent raconteur, penned down the fond stories he had as a child in Hannibal, Missouri. Such stories appeared in his 1875 book “Old times on the Mississippi”. Twain also credits the port town’s buzzing and colorful nature for shaping his imagination.

The labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave in Hannibal was featured in Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as McDougal’s Cave.

What jobs did Mark Twain have?

Before taking up writing as a full time job, Mark Twain worked in a variety of jobs. In the years after his father’s death, he began working to supplement his family’s meager income. In 1848, he was employed as a printer’s apprentice for the Missouri Courier. Then in 1851, he was employed as typesetter in his brother Orion’s Hannibal newspaper, the Journal. It was probably around this time that Twain began to hone his talents in writing. He would sometimes write sketches and articles for the journal. His sketch titled “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” (1852) received quite a number of followers as it was carried in many local newspapers.

Mark Twain’s older brother Orion purchased the Hannibal Journal in 1850. Twain got employed in the newspaper as a typesetter. He also worked as an editor when his brother was not available.

Towards his late teens, he resigned from his brother’s journal and pursued his own endeavors, including being a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853. He worked for a number of printing businesses in the east, including in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City. He worked as a laborer for many years, until he was almost 40, when according to him got up one day and entered into the writing profession proper.

Twain spent a great number of years travelling through many states in the East. His journeys enriched his literary mind, allowing him to gain a very wide perspective of the world that he lived in.

Time as a steamboat pilot

In 1857, he became an apprentice for a riverboat captain called Horace Bixby. He is said to have paid $500 in apprentice fee. He studied the Mississippi River and desired nothing than to acquire a pilot license.

Working with other veteran pilots, Samuel Clemens quickly learned the trade. He took quite a lot of pride in being a steamboat pilot. Back the steamboat pilot was very well respected, even more than the captain. Steamboat pilots earned good wages in addition to the respect they received from the society.

Twain saw the job as one that gave him a great deal of freedom and self-sufficiency, believing that the job also instilled in him discipline, a sense of purpose and direction. He was a member of the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association. By 1859, he had received his pilot’s license.

Mark Twain’s wife and daughters

Mark Twain’s wife – Olivia Langdon in 1869

While traveling through Europe in the late 1860s, he met Charles Langdon, who later introduced Twain to his sister Olivia Langdon. Mark Twain noted that he fell head over heels for Olivia, who was the daughter of a businessman from Elmira, New York. The two tied the knot in February 1870.

With some bit of help from his wife’s father, the couple were able to buy one-third interest in the Express of Buffalo, New York.

Mark Twain’s daughters (L-R): Susy, Clara, and Jean

After making their home in Buffalo, New York, Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon had four children, one son and three daughters: Langdon, Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962), and Jean (1880-1909). Langdon died (of diphtheria) in 1872, before turning two.

Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon spanned for 34 years until she died in 1904.

Personal tragedies suffered by Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s losses weren’t only financial. The acclaimed writer suffered a series of personal losses in the last decade of the 19 th century and the early 20 th century.

His daughter Susy died of spinal meningitis in 1896. His daughter’s death was a huge blow to him and his wife, who was plagued by an awful sickness by then. Twain committed himself to his work in an attempt to mitigate the pain. That same year, his other daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. The family visited many European countries looking for a remedy.

On June 5, 1904, his wife died, sending him into an even deeper depression. His book Eve’s Diary (1906) – which talks about the love between Adam and Eve – was in honor of his deceased wife.

On December 24, 1909, his daughter Jean succumbed to complications from her epilepsy.  Twain wrote the book “The Death of Jean” (1911) to honor her. About six months prior to Jean’s death, his very close friend Henry Rogers died.

All of those personal tragedies made him sad and lonely in his final few years.

Mark Twain during the American Civil War

He worked on the steamboat until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. For a brief period, he served in the Confederate Army, however, he later deserted, stating that he was not made to be a soldier.

“The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” – a sketch in 1885 – a fictional memoir – his time in the Confederate Missouri State Guard in Marion County, Missouri – group of inexperienced militiamen called the Marion Rangers

Mark Twain and his brother Orion fled from Hannibal to the Nevada Territory. His brother was a Republican and supported Abraham Lincoln ’s presidential bid. For that, Orion Clemens was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada.

While in Nevada Territory, he took trading in silver, timber and gold in the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. Success was a hard to come by as a miner. With the help of a newspaper editor Joseph Goodman, he became a reporter at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Many of the stories he covered the city’s endemic corruption and moral decadence. He performed his job diligently, even at the risk to his life.

It was around this time that he started going by the pen name “Mark Twain”.  He also grew into his literary profession. Some of his articles appeared outside the territory, in places like New York.

In a brash act of immaturity, he challenged the editor of a San Francisco newspaper to a duel. After realizing how reckless his action was, he fled the city out of fear. In the mid-1860s, Twain headed to San Francisco to work as a full-time reporter for the Call. He also worked with the Golden Era.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865)

One of Mark Twain’s most famous short stories, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), was inspired by his experiences after he had fled San Francisco to Tuolumne foothills in the U.S. state of California.  The story was a huge success, bringing the humorist critical acclaim.

In 1866, he took up a job with the Sacramento Union as a reporter. He work in Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) would later serve as important material for his first lecture tour.

In 1867, he worked as a traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California. The newspaper paid for his trip to Europe and the Holy Land on the condition that he writes travel stories for the newspaper. Those letters are what turned into the travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869) (also known as The New Pilgrims’ Progress ), which proved to be a huge success.

Mark Twain, born Samuel L. Clemens, attained worldwide acclaim with his very popular books. He was also famed for his lecture tour, which fetched considerable amount of money, especially in his later years.

Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

The writer and novelist Mark Twain was said to have been a big fan of technology and science. Out of this curiosity, he formed a strong friendship with inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla . Twain even got to patent a number of inventions that had made, including a detachable straps for garments.

Twain’s association with Nikola Tesla rubbed off a bit in the novelist’s works. For example, in his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , Twain writes about a fictional American time traveler who finds himself in the age of King Arthur and tries to help the people with modern technology.

Twain was also an acquaintance of Thomas Edison, one of Tesla’s arch rivals in the scientific world. In 1909, Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, visited Twain at his home in Connecticut and took a motion picture of him.

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, in the laboratory of Nikola Tesla, early 1894

Mark Twain’s publishing house

In 1884, Twain established his own publishing company. He partnered with nephew and businessman Charles L. Webster. The publishing company, which was known as Charles L. Webster and Company, experienced severe financial problems and then went bust in 1894. In spite of his determined efforts to keep the company afloat using his own personal money, the publishing house still folded up.

The publishing house still made history with its first two publications: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and former US president Ulysses S. Grant ’s memoir – the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885). Both books received a lot of critical acclaim. Twain’s publication of U.S. Grant’s memoir helped lift the former U.S. general and POTUS out of a financial misery. After the death of Grant, Twain presented a whopping $450,000 to Julia Grant, the wife of Grant.

Read More:  10 Military Achievements of U.S. Grant

Mark Twain and James W. Paige

An avid admirer of science and technology, Mark Twain invested heavily in the Paige Compositor, an invention by James W. Paige (1842-1917). For someone who was once a typesetter, Twain bought into the invention that was made to make human typesetter obsolete.

Unfortunately, technical problems in the design caused the machine to be a huge flop on the market. Mark Twain invested about a quarter of a million USD into the machine that never turned a profit. The horrible venture marked the beginning of the writer’s financial woes.  By 1891, Twain had given up on the project. The financial crisis of 1893 further compounded his mounting debt problem, causing him to file for personal bankruptcy.

With the help of Wall Street business executive and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers, Twain was able to turn things around. His world lecture tour and book sales helped him to pay all his debts.

Note: In today’s dollar, the amount ($300,000) Mark Twain spent on the Paige Compositor is the equivalent of about $ 9.5 million.

Most famous Mark Twain works

American humorist and novelist Mark Twain authored more than 20 novels | Image: Twain, age 31

Mark Twain is undoubtedly the greatest humorist in modern American literature. He once described humor as his “strongest suit”. The author believed that humor is a call to literature of a low order. The following are the most famous works by Mark Twain:

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867)
• Roughing It (1872) – a semi-autobiographical travel book by Mark Twain
• The Gilded Age (1873) – a book that exposed the financial corruption in the U.S.
• A True Story (1874) – published in the Atlantic Monthly.
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) – Mark Twain described it as a “hymn” to his childhood. The book, which is full of nostalgia, follows the story of a mischievous boy. The book is still in print, as both young and old readers can relate to it.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) – Mark Twain began writing this book in 1876. The novel, a sequel to Tom Sawyer,  follows the story of Huck Finn, a character from the book Tom Sawyer.
• The Prince and the Pauper (1881)
• Life on the Mississippi (1883)
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895/96)
• Following the Equator (1897)
• What Is Man? ( 1906)
• King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)

World lecture tour

In 1895, Mark Twain went on a world lecture tour in an attempt to raise money to pay his creditors. The writer visited places in Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia, among others.

He was able to author a book primarily using the experiences of his tour in India. The book was titled Following the Equator (1897).

When and how did Mark Twain die?

Mark Twain was born shortly after the passing of Halley’s Comet. Interestingly, he died a day after the comet passed by the Earth again. The humorist had stated that he was bound to “go out with it”.

On April 21, 1910, Mark Twain died in his Stormfield home in Redding, Connecticut. The humorist and novelist was aged 74, and was survived by his daughter Clara.

Then-U.S. president William Howard Taft sent his heartfelt condolences to Twain’s surviving relatives. The president paid homage to his contribution American literature, heaping praise on his works for giving enormous pleasure to millions of people across the world.

The last work he was working on – “Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine” – was posthumously published in 1995. It is a short humorous sketch.

Mark Twain was buried at a family plot in Elmira, New York, alongside his wife, his son, and two daughters. He left an estate valued at almost half a million USD (about $13 million in today’s dollars). | Image: Twain and his wife are buried side by side in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery

Mark Twain’s real name

Origin of Mark Twain’s pen name | Other pen names of Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) included Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass and Josh, among others. In the end, he picked Mark Twain as his pseudonym.

Unbeknownst to many people Mark Twain is actually the pen name of Samuel Clemens. But why did Samuel Clemens choose the pen name Mark Twain?

Before settling on “Mark Twain”, the writer used a number of different pseudonyms, including “Josh” and “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”. The first time he used a pen name was in the early 1850s when he signed a sketch in his brother’s newspaper “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins”.

The name “Mark Twain” emerged during his years working as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. Mark twain is the nautical term for water found to be two fathoms – i.e. 12 feet (3.7 meters) deep. Thus mark means “measure”, while twain means “ two”.

Mark Twain also acknowledged that his famous pen name was used by Captain Isaiah Sellers before he adopted in his literary profession.

Mark Twain quotes

The following are 5 major quotes by Mark Twain, the writer who is commonly regarded as the greatest humorist in the history of the United States.

More Mark Twain Facts

The following are six more facts about Mark Twain:

Image: Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his D.Litt. degree, awarded to him by Oxford University in 1907

• The asteroid 2362 is named after Mark Twain.
• William Dean Howells, his friend and author and critic, described him as the “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature” in the book My Mark Twain (1910).
• Ernest Hemingway writes in The Green Hills of Africa (1935), “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”.
• In January 1901, he became the vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York – January 1901
• He received Honorary degrees from Yale University in 1901; the University of Missouri in 1902 (honorary Doctor of Laws); and Oxford University in 1907.
• He convinced his younger brother Henry Clemens to join the steamboat job. Unfortunately, Henry died on June 21, 1858 after getting severely injured in an explosion on the steamboat. Twain would forever feel guilty for the death of his brother Henry.

Tags: American novelists Hannibal-Missouri Mark Twain Missouri-U.S. Samuel Clemens The Gilded Age Tom Sawyer

You may also like...

William Shakespeare: Biography, Major Plays & Death

June 5, 2019

12 Major Facts about Edgar Allan Poe

June 2, 2020

Alexander Pushkin: Biography, Most Famous Works & Accomplishments

September 24, 2022

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Next story  Stephen King: Biography, Books, and Major Achievements and Awards
• Previous story  Henry III of England: History, Family Tree, Reign, Achievements, & Death
• Popular Posts
• Recent Posts

Queen Victoria’s grandsons who ruled Britain, Germany, and Russia

Who was Ctesias of Cnidus?

Viking Raider Hastein: History & Major Facts

Why were earth and water considered symbols of submission in the ancient world?

Greatest Masterpieces of Hellenistic Art

Greatest African Leaders of all Time

Queen Elizabeth II: 10 Major Achievements

Donald Trump’s Educational Background

Donald Trump: 10 Most Significant Achievements

8 Most Important Achievements of John F. Kennedy

Odin in Norse Mythology: Origin Story, Meaning and Symbols

Ragnar Lothbrok – History, Facts & Legendary Achievements

9 Great Achievements of Queen Victoria

12 Most Influential Presidents of the United States

Most Ruthless African Dictators of All Time

Kwame Nkrumah: History, Major Facts & 10 Memorable Achievements

Greek God Hermes: Myths, Powers and Early Portrayals

8 Major Achievements of Rosa Parks

Kamala Harris: 10 Major Achievements

10 Most Famous Pharaohs of Egypt

How did Captain James Cook die?

The Exact Relationship between Elizabeth II and Elizabeth I

Nile River: Location, Importance & Major Facts

Sobek in Egyptian Mythology: Origin Story, Family, Powers, & Symbols

How and when was Morse Code Invented?

• Adolf Hitler Alexander the Great American Civil War Ancient Egyptian gods Ancient Egyptian religion Apollo Athena Athens Black history Carthage China Civil Rights Movement Cold War Constantine the Great Constantinople Egypt England France Germany Hera Horus India Isis John Adams Julius Caesar Loki Medieval History Military Generals Military History Nobel Peace Prize Odin Osiris Pan-Africanism Queen Elizabeth I Ra Religion Set (Seth) Soviet Union Thor Timeline Turkey Women’s History World War I World War II Zeus

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Biographies & Memoirs

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant Kindle Edition

• Print length 440 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publication date December 15, 2007
• File size 1038 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was an American commanding general and the eighteenth president of the United States.

Born Hiram Ulysses Grant and raised in Georgetown, Ohio, Grant was enrolled by his abolitionist father in the Military Academy at West Point. After graduation, Grant served as quartermaster during the Mexican-American War. As Union commander, Grant was instrumental in the victories of the most critical battles of the Civil War. Postwar, Grant was promoted to five-star general and oversaw the military portion of Reconstruction. In 1868, Grant was elected to the presidency of the United States, serving two terms.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0011DIF02
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ LeClue [Kindle] (December 15, 2007)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 15, 2007
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1038 KB
• Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 440 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1537092049

About the author

Ulysses s. grant.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Autobiography of Mark Twain – review

T he idea of a memoir that flowed in a canal-straight course was never going to interest Samuel L Clemens, still less his irrepressible alter ego, Mark Twain. Like the river that became his greatest subject, there would have to be meanderings and digressive tributaries, sudden floods of drama and discarded ox-bows of comic observation; moreover it would, by necessity, just keep rolling along. That The Autobiography of Mark Twain should have been begun while the author was 42, and restarted and abandoned 30 or 40 times over the course of the next three decades, that it should have eventually done away with beginnings and middles and ends and sought to submerge the reader in the unstoppable narrative of what was on the mind of America's favourite writer on any morning he chose to compose it, should therefore come as no surprise. Neither should the fact that a century after the book concluded – with the author's death – much of it still reads as compulsively as if it were being dictated in the next room.

Twain insisted on the 100-year embargo before publication in order to allow himself to speak freely, to tell all – though the idea that he had been tight-lipped in his opinions up to that point would have come as news to both friends and enemies. The embargo was not honoured by his estate's trustees, and various abridged versions of the autobiography have appeared over the years. Never before has the book been published as Twain wished it, though – in all its fragmentary and convoluted glory. It is, too, a valedictory gift that keeps on giving; this is the first volume of three, which will be spaced over much of the next decade. It comes freighted with about 300 pages of impeccable scholarly and biographical notes, an academic undertaking, led by Harriet Elinor Smith of the Mark Twain project, which seems proof of the notion that you can't say one thing without immediately having to qualify it with another. The exhaustive apparatus would no doubt have amused the satirist in Twain and, in the way it constantly demands cross-referencing, frustrated the immediacy-addicted reporter.

If the editing of this edition has been a labour of love, the writing of it often seems less so. Twain appears to have felt honour-bound, or fated, to attempt to do justice to his world-famous, white-suited life, while at the same time worrying that any attempt to contain his shifting enthusiasm, his incessant imagination, his scattergun prejudices and vitriol and jokes, was almost doomed from the outset. Among the many entertaining themes of this volume are the various and contradictory prefatory notes to self, about the impossibility of the project on which he is embarked: "What a little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!" he offers at one point. "His real life is in his head and is known to none but himself…" If this internal monologue were to be written, he suggests, prefiguring Leopold Bloom by 20 years, "every day would make a book of eighty thousand words, three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written…"

Twain's ultimate solution to this problem was to have a secretary follow him around and take down his every passing thought. This was "The Final (and Right) Plan" at which he laboured for much of the last six years of his life, first in Florence, Italy, and subsequently in New York and elsewhere, often from his bed. What the method lacked in logic, it made up in offering an authentic glimpse of how Twain's mind worked, or at least how it was working as he neared the end of his life.

He struck upon his autobiographical method when his wife, Livi, was convalescing and eventually dying in Florence. It is a subject he seems to want to confront, but knows only how to avoid. His account of that period thus involves a very long and involved room-by-room account of the villa in which they were staying in Tuscany, and an impassioned diatribe against the perceived wickedness of the villa's owner, an "American countess", "this reptile with a filthy soul", prompted by a clause in the rental contract that the best bedrooms in the house "should not be contaminated with illness". Twain devotes nearly 20 entertaining pages to this account, in which his wife's terminal condition finds a few short sentences, and her eventual death, none at all.

Though he hardly says as much, it does feel as if this and what follows was conceived in some of the extremity and rawness of grief for Livi, of whom he later wrote: "In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her." This sense of loneliness was compounded by the fact that Twain had by then also buried two of his four children – a good deal of his reminiscence comes in response to moving little scraps of notes that his daughter Susy had prepared for a book about him, before she died; another daughter, Jean, would predecease him in the course of his narration. The atmosphere of loss was no doubt complicated by the woman Twain chose as his secretary, Isabel Lyon, who not only had designs on recording his life, but also on becoming an intimate last chapter in it. Twain seemed to defend himself against this flirtation, much-examined by recent biographers, both by constructing on occasion long tributes to his wife's unblemished character and beauty, and by successively signing over control of his estate to Lyon and her feckless husband (a decision he spent much of his final year trying to overturn).

That capacity for self-destruction, particularly in financial matters, clearly went right to the root of Twain's understanding of himself. His memory at the end of his life dwelt not on his successes – Huck Finn rates hardly a mention – but all the plans that went on the rocks. He seemed plagued by this contradiction: how could a man who understood so much of human nature know so little of how the world of money worked? He was forever testing his novelist's intuition against the possibilities of commerce, with disastrous results. The first version of the autobiography, reproduced here, begins with a painful account of the way he and his brother Orion squandered an inheritance that amounted to 75,000 acres of land in Tennessee, land subsequently discovered to be rich in oil and minerals and forestry, but from the disposal of which they earned hardly a cent. As if to correct this outrageous fortune, the author of The Prince and The Pauper subsequently involved himself in all manner of speculative schemes, now investing heavily in a powdered milk substitute, now in a vineyard, and now in a patent for a typesetting machine, a gamble that almost bankrupted him (and his independently wealthy wife) and that fuels much of his later cantankerous rage against both the (successful) gamblers of Wall Street, and the growing American empire that their capital funded. "I am opposed to millionaires," he noted, "but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."

Twain's great virtue as a writer, his genius, was his deliberate refusal of borrowed propriety or scale. The tallest of tales could be fashioned from the most modest of ingredients. That skill is fully on display here, as he magnifies the trivial – a hilarious attempt to send a letter to France from a London post office, for example – while providing conversational intimacy for great historical shifts – in his dismantling of the neo-colonialism of Theodore Roosevelt, say, or his championing of Booker T Washington's nascent civil rights fervour. In all of this it is prudent, he suggests, to bear in mind his mother's words about him as a boy: "I discount him thirty per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth without a flaw in it anywhere." It is good to know that the ratio served him well right up until the end.

• The Observer
• Biography books
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain
• Autobiography and memoir

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Barron Trump 'Honored,' But Declines Delegate Invite from RNC

R umors of Barron Trump's first foray into politics, like those premature reports of Mark Twain's death, have been greatly exaggerated.

Many outlets -- including The Western Journal \-- reported Thursday that former President Donald Trump's youngest son would serve as a Florida delegate to the Republican National Convention in July.

Those reports were based on an exclusive from NBC News that said things like "It will soon be Barron Trump’s time to step into the political spotlight" and "Trump’s position as a delegate will be his highest-profile political role thus far."

It certainly would be ... if he were going to accept the role. Which, according to his mother's office, he is not.

"While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments," the Office of Melania Trump told the U.K.'s Daily Mail in a statement Friday.

"It's now unclear if he will even attend the convention, which takes place in Milwaukee from Monday, July 15 to Thursday, July 18," the outlet added.

Trump's younger daughter, Tiffany, and older sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric, were also invited by the Florida Republican Party to travel to Milwaukee to vote for Trump to become officially what he already is for all practical purposes -- the Republican nominee in November's presidential election.

Eric Trump will serve as the delegation's chairman, NBC reported.

"We have a great delegation of grassroots leaders, elected officials and even Trump family members," Florida GOP chairman Evan Power told NBC. "Florida is continuing to have a great convention team, but more importantly we are preparing to win Florida and win it big."

Donald Trump, 77, won Florida in both of the last two elections, beating former first lady Hillary Clinton by a little over 1 percent in 2016 and then besting Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the state by a more significant 3.3 percent margin in 2020.

Other invited at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention include a number of what NBC called "the former president’s top supporters."

"Others include Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée; Michael Boulous, Tiffany Trump’s husband; former state Attorney General Pam Bondi, a longtime Trump ally who has run pro-Trump super PACs; longtime Trump adviser Sergio Gor; former Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter, a prominent Trump donor; and a series of state-level Republican politicians who took the risk of endorsing Trump over [Gov. Ron] DeSantis," NBC reported.

The mainstream outlet made much of the former rivalry between Trump and the Florida governor , who ran against each other for the Republican presidential nomination, pointing out that Florida GOP members "largely lined up behind" Trump even as their governor was still running in the Republican primary.

"In September, party leaders voted to remove a loyalty pledge requirement that would have required GOP presidential candidates to support the eventual Republican nominee to be on the state’s March 19 primary ballot," NBC reported late Wednesday. "The proposal was supported by Trump but openly opposed by DeSantis’ campaign."

NBC reached out to the Trump campaign for comment -- as did Axios \-- but received no reply.

Barron Trump has been in the news lately as his father has sought a break from his Manhattan trial to attend his high school graduation next week, a request Judge Juan Merchan granted.

The trial -- which NBC and other mainstream outlets continue to insist revolved around so-called "hush money payments to an adult film star" but is actually more accurately described as having to do with the alleged falsification of business records -- is expected to continue into at least late May and perhaps even into June.

Axios noted that of all of Donald Trump's children, only Ivanka Trump -- who announced her retirement from political activities in 2022 -- was not invited to serve in Florida's delegation to the convention.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef Goes Nuclear: What to Know

The two rappers had circled one another for more than a decade, but their attacks turned relentless and very personal in a slew of tracks released over the weekend.

By Joe Coscarelli

The long-building and increasingly testy rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake exploded into full-bore acrimony and unverifiable accusations over the weekend. Both artists rapid-fire released multiple songs littered with attacks regarding race, appropriation, sexual and physical abuse, body image, misogyny, hypocrisy, generational trauma and more.

Most relentless was Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner from Compton, Calif., who tends toward the isolated and considered but has now released four verbose and conceptual diss tracks — totaling more than 20 minutes of new music — targeting Drake in the last week, including three since Friday.

Each racked up millions of streams and the three that were made available commercially — “Euphoria,” “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” — are expected to land near the top of next week’s Billboard singles chart, while seeming to, at least momentarily, shift the public perception of Drake, long a maestro of the online public arena and meme ecosystem .

In between, on Friday night, Drake released his own broadside against Lamar — plus a smattering of other recent challengers — in a teasing Instagram interlude plus a three-part track and elaborate music video titled “Family Matters,” in which he referred to his rival as a fake activist and attempted to expose friction and alleged abuse in Lamar’s romantic relationship.

But that song was followed within half an hour by Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams,” an ominous extended address to the parents and young son of Drake, born Aubrey Graham, in which Lamar refers to his rival rapper as a liar and “pervert” who “should die” in order to make the world safer for women.

Lamar also seemed to assert that Drake had more than a decade ago fathered a secret daughter — echoing the big reveal of his son from Drake’s last headline rap beef — a claim Drake quickly denied on Instagram before hitting back in another song on Sunday. (Neither man has addressed the full array of rapped allegations directly.)

On Tuesday, a security guard was shot and seriously injured outside of Drake’s Toronto home, which appeared on the cover art for Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Authorities said they could not yet speak to a motive in the shooting, but the investigation was ongoing. Representatives for Drake and Lamar did not immediately comment.

How did two of the most famous artists in the world decide to take the gloves off and bring real-life venom into an extended sparring match for rap supremacy? It was weeks, months and years in the making, with a sudden, breakneck escalation into hip-hop infamy. Here’s a breakdown.

Since late March, the much-anticipated head-to-head seemed inevitable. Following years of “will they or won’t they?” lyrical feints, Lamar hit directly on record first this year during a surprise appearance on the song “Like That” by the Atlanta rapper Future and the producer Metro Boomin, both formerly frequent Drake collaborators.

With audible disgust, Lamar invoked the track “First Person Shooter” from last year’s Drake album, “For All the Dogs,” in which a guest verse from J. Cole referred to himself, Drake and Lamar as “the big three” of modern MCs.

Lamar took exception to the grouping, declaring that there was no big three, “just big me.” He also called himself the Prince to Drake’s Michael Jackson — a deeper, more complex artist versus a troubled, pop-oriented hitmaker.

“Like That” spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, as Future and Metro Boomin released two chart-topping albums — “We Don’t Trust You” and “We Still Don’t Trust You” — that were anchored by a parade of Drake’s past associates, each of whom seemed to share a simmering distaste toward the rapper, who later called the ambush a “20 v. 1” fight.

In early April, J. Cole fought back momentarily , releasing the song “7 Minute Drill,” in which he called Lamar overrated, before backtracking, apologizing and having the song removed from streaming services. But Drake soon picked up the baton, releasing a wide-ranging diss track called “Push Ups” less than a week later that addressed the field, with a special focus on Lamar’s height, shoe size and supposedly disadvantageous business dealings.

Less than a week later, Drake mocked Lamar’s lack of a response on “Taylor Made Freestyle,” a track released only on social media. It featured Drake taunting Lamar for being scared to release music at the same time as Taylor Swift and using A.I. voice filters to mimic Tupac and Snoop Dogg imploring Lamar to battle for the good of the West Coast.

“Since ‘Like That,’ your tone changed a little, you not as enthused,” Drake rapped in an abbreviated third verse, as himself. “How are you not in the booth? It feel like you kinda removed.” (“Taylor Made Freestyle” was later removed from the internet at the request of the Tupac Estate.)

But it was a seemingly tossed-off line from the earlier “Push Ups” that included the name of Lamar’s longtime romantic partner — “I be with some bodyguards like Whitney” — that Lamar would later allude to as a red line crossed, making all subject matter fair game in the songs to come. (It was this same alleged faux pas that may have triggered an intensification of Drake’s beef with Pusha T in 2018.)

How We Got Here

Even with Drake-dissing cameos from Future, Ye (formerly Kanye West), Rick Ross, the Weeknd and ASAP Rocky, the main event was always going to be between Drake, 37, and Lamar, 36, who have spent more than a decade subtly antagonizing one another in songs while maintaining an icy frenemy rapport in public.

In 2011, when Drake introduced Lamar to mainstream audiences with a dedicated showcase on his second album, “Take Care,” and an opening slot on the subsequent arena tour, the tone was one of side-eying competition. “He said that he was the same age as myself/and it didn’t help ’cause it made me even more rude and impatient,” Lamar rapped on “Buried Alive Interlude” of his earliest encounter with a more-famous Drake. (On his Instagram on Friday, Drake released a parody of the track, citing Lamar’s jealousy since then.)

The pair went on to appear together on “Poetic Justice,” a single from Lamar’s debut album, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” in 2012, as well as “___ Problems” by ASAP Rocky the same year.

But their collaborations ceased as Drake became his generation’s premier hitmaker across styles in hip-hop and beyond, while Lamar burrowed deeper into his own psyche on knotty concept albums that brought wide critical acclaim alongside less constant commercial success.

When asked, the two rappers tended to profess admiration for one another’s skill, but seemed to trade subtle digs in verses over the years, always with plausible deniability and in the spirit of competition, leading to something of a hip-hop cold war.

The Week It Went Nuclear

Lamar’s first targeted response, “Euphoria,” was more than six minutes long and released last Tuesday morning. In three sections that raised the temperature as they built, he warned Drake about proceeding and insisted, somewhat facetiously, that things were still friendly. “Know you a master manipulator and habitual liar too,” Lamar rapped. “But don’t tell no lie about me and I won’t tell truths ’bout you.”

He accused the biracial Drake, who was born and raised in Toronto, of imitating Black American heritage and insulting him subliminally. “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress,” Lamar said. “I hate the way that you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct.” And he called Drake’s standing as a father into question: “Teachin’ him morals, integrity, discipline/listen, man, you don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”

Days later, Lamar doubled down with an Instagram-only track called “6:16 in LA,” borrowing both Drake’s “Back to Back” diss tactic from his 2015 beef with Meek Mill and a song title structure lifted from what is known as Drake’s time-stamp series of raps. Opting for psychological warfare on a beat produced in part by Jack Antonoff, Swift’s chief collaborator, Lamar hinted that he had a mole in Drake’s operation and was aware of his opponent’s opposition research.

“Fake bully, I hate bullies, you must be a terrible person,” he rapped. “Everyone inside your team is whispering that you deserve it.”

That night, Drake’s “Family Matters” started with its own justification for getting personal — “You mentioned my seed, now deal with his dad/I gotta go bad, I gotta go bad” — before taking on Lamar’s fatherhood and standing as a man in excruciating detail. “They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen,” Drake rapped. “The picture you painted ain’t what it seem/you’re dead.”

Yet in a chess move that seemed to anticipate Drake’s familial line of attack, Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams” was released almost immediately. “This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game,” Lamar said, noting that Drake had erred “the moment you called out my family’s name.” Instead of a rap battle, Lamar concluded after another six minutes of psychological dissection, “this a long life battle with yourself.”

He wasn’t done yet. Dispensing with subtlety, Lamar followed up again less than 24 hours later with “Not Like Us,” a bouncy club record in a Los Angeles style that delighted in more traditional rap beef territory, like juvenile insults, proudly unsubstantiated claims of sexual preferences and threats of violence.

Lamar, however, didn’t leave it at that, throwing one more shot at Drake’s authenticity as a rapper, calling him a greedy and artificial user as a collaborator — “not a colleague,” but a “colonizer.”

On Sunday evening, Drake responded yet again. On “The Heart Part 6,” a title taken from Lamar’s career-spanning series, Drake denied the accusation that he preyed on young women, indicated that he had planted the bad information about his fake daughter and seemed to sigh away the fight as “some good exercise.”

“It’s good to get out, get the pen working,” Drake said in an exhausted outro. “You would be a worthy competitor if I was really a predator.” He added, “You know, at least your fans are getting some raps out of you. I’m happy I could motivate you.”

Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter with a focus on popular music, and the author of “Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story.” More about Joe Coscarelli

Explore the World of Hip-Hop

The long-building and increasingly testy rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake  has exploded into full-bore acrimony .

As their influence and success continue to grow, artists including Sexyy Red and Cardi B are destigmatizing motherhood for hip-hop performers .

ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s , illustrating how they have driven the aesthetics and the narratives of hip-hop.

Three new books cataloging objects central to rap’s physical history  demonstrate the importance of celebrating these relics before they vanish.

Hip-hop got its start in a Bronx apartment building 50 years ago. Here’s how the concept of home has been at the center of the genre ever since .

Over five decades, hip-hop has grown from a new art form to a culture-defining superpower . In their own words, 50 influential voices chronicle its evolution .