August 17, 2009 • 23 mins
Almost a century after his death, Mark Twain remains a literary legend. Join Katie and Sarah as they take a closer look at the quintessential American author in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.
How are you, Sarah? I'm well, how are you, Katie good.
I'm going to start you off with a quote today
(00:22):
by a very famous man, and you can guess who
it is. Okay, man is a marvelous curiosity. When he's
at his very very best, he is a sort of
low grade nickel plated angel. At his worst, he's unspeakable, unimaginable,
and first and last and all the time, he's a sarcasm.
I'm gonna hazard. That was Mark Twain Bingo. So today
(00:45):
we're talking about Mark Twain, mr. Literary genius, and we'll
start with his childhood as we do. Samuel Langhorne Clemens
was born in Florida, Missouri, in eighteen thirty five. UM.
He was premature and pretty thickly for the first ten
years of his life, which contributed a lot to how
(01:07):
his personality developed. He had to stay inside with his mother,
so he was kind of coddled, but he liked to
rebel with little acts of mischief, and you know, it
was a sweet, good natured kid though. Um. And he
also had a lot of remedies that his mother would
(01:30):
try to, you know, perform on him, which might have
added to kind of some quackery. The guinea pig child
happened later in life. He was one of seven kids.
I think he was number six of the seven um Orion, Pamela, Pleasant, Margaret, Benjamin,
and Henry. And only three of them I believe lived
(01:52):
out of childhood, and obviously Samuel was one of them.
His parents had a courteous but not a warm may
Ridge he has said, yeah, and um. When he was
a few years old, Uh, the family's fortunes kind of
started to change and they were forced to move to Hannibal, Missouri,
(02:13):
on the Mississippi River. Um. And another thing he would
talk about is he you know, he was kind of poor,
but the family had this unsettling belief that they would
come into money. His father owned some property in Tennessee,
which I'm not sure why, but he believed that would
(02:33):
be his fortune in the end. And he he later
said that it's a fine thing to grow up rich.
It's a fine thing to grow up poor, that's wholesome,
But to grow up perspectively, rich is not a healthy state. Well,
and kind of in between the two, even having the
prospect of it behind you and also in front of you. Yeah,
it may not give you the most healthy attitude toward money, which,
(02:55):
as we'll see later, definitely affected him. Yeah, but Hannibal
was a nice place for a kid to grow up
for a lot of ways. It had a lot of
fun outdoor pursuits, and some of his favorite boyhood sites
like Glasgow's Island and McDowell's Cave later appear in his writing. Um,
(03:17):
and as a boy he also read a lot James Fenimore, Cooper,
Sir Walter Scott. He played Robin Hood and pirates with
his friends. Um, but it wasn't all super picturesque. So
you're telling me some gruesome stories this morning and looking
over your notes, and it's it's a little disturbing. Yeah,
(03:39):
he uh. You know, Hannibal was sometimes a rather violent town,
and just in his childhood he found a corpse in
his father's office. We should say his father was a
justice of the peace, so not quite as bad as
it sounds. But he saw a man who was shot
to die in the street. He watched a friend drowned
(04:01):
and he found a few days after that, he found
a drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. So
that all sounds like a pretty traumatic childhood, but maybe
it's par for the chorus for a boundary state. At
the time, I don't know. And I had read a
story about his family owned a slave, Jenny, who acted
as their nursemaid, and he saw her brutally whipped when
(04:24):
he was about six after a little altercation with his mother.
So the slavery stuff will figure in his works as well. Yeah,
and he was also influenced. During his summers, he'd go
back to Florida, Missouri to stay with his uncle, and
he and his cousins would be told tales by a
(04:44):
slave called Uncle Daniel, who ended up being in part
a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. And another little
fact I like about his childhood was that he was
a sleepwalker. One night, when he was sleepwalking, he apparently
went to sister's room and picked up the edge of
her covers, which was supposed to be superstitiously a sign
(05:07):
that someone was going to die, and she did die
the next day, which led everyone in his family to
think that he had the second sight, and that was
another thing that stayed with him, that idea of paranormal activity.
And he was interested in science and invention. You know,
it seems later in life too, he takes responsibility for
death that clearly are not I wonder if that it
(05:30):
started way back then. But like most you know, young
boys at the time, he takes an apprenticeship and works
for a printer. And one story I really enjoy about
his apprenticeship that he tells in his autobiography, which I
would highly recommend. I've read the Charles Needer version, although
there are a few of them out there. Um. But
(05:52):
when he was working as a printer's apprentice to make
something fit a sermon, they put j C in for
Jesus Christ. And you know, obviously the printer thought that
was disrespectful and told them they had better put the
full name every single time they would not be abbreviating it.
And so, just to be a jerk, he put Jesus H.
(06:12):
Christ and all in all instances and gotten quite a
bit of trouble. But you know, his his printing career
kind of got off to a start maybe after that
despite that. Uh, and he was fortunate enough to have
an older brother who was already established in printing and publishing. Um.
(06:35):
He his brother Orion bought the Hannibal Journal, and uh,
Samuel contributed sketches and articles as well as you know,
doing type studying and printing work. And isn't that I
think that's the first time he used a pseudonym. It
is and his first pseudonym. This might be mangled here,
(06:57):
but w et the note. Nanda's justice Perkins. We've had
a lot of troubles with their names because the entire
time we thought Orion was a Ryan and Pamela was Pamela.
We were wrong. His mother liked different um, she liked
different lats definitely, So, Sarah, as you have said, Mark
(07:22):
Twain had entirely too many jobs for you to remember.
So he went on from this newspaper job and started
working at printing shops and was also writing, and then
he went to South America. He was planning to go
to South America. Sounds like kind of a crazy scheme,
but he was going to take a steamboat in eighteen
(07:45):
fifty seven to New Orleans and then from there going
to South America. But he never made it because he
was so fascinated by the steamboat, got talking to the
captain and persuaded the captain to take him on as
a steamboat pilot apprentice, which ended up being one of
his favorite jobs. He absolutely loved it. The freedom and um,
(08:10):
technical skill and discipline that came with being a pilot. Well,
and if you got your pilot license, I think you were.
It was a pretty lucrative job. Although it was it
was tough. You had to know all the different depths
and marks and everything of the river, which was not easy.
This is also when he first hears the name Mark Twain.
(08:31):
He lampoons a senior pilot, Isaiah Sellars, who had published
some very short, to the point observations of life on
the Mississippi and weather and very straightforward things. Uh. And
even though Clemens kind of mocked him, he really liked
(08:53):
this guy's pen name, and so he kept it. He
did his own to his credit, when he started using
the pen name Mark Twain, he thought that Isaiah Sellers
was dead. Not true, because somebody stole your pen name.
Don't steal mine, Sarah. He had to leave steamboat piloting.
I think you and I had found different things. I
(09:14):
found that it was because um, the war was breaking
out and the business was drying up, and I think
you found something. I heard that he was a little
worried he'd be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, which
and at some point I think he was part of
a Confederate unit, so I don't think he would have
enjoyed that well. His his allegiance during the Civil War
(09:34):
is a little questionable, though he has his older brother
Orion was actually a really strong Lincoln supporter, so I guess,
like any um border state like that, he kind of
cane in the middle. He quit the Marian Rangers, which
was the volunteer Confederate unit, after two weeks, so apparently
(09:56):
wasn't not dedicated to At this point point, he took
yet another job and decided that he would go mind
some silver. Who would really like to see Mark Twain's resume.
I think there would be some gaps and there It
might be hard to explain, but he wasn't a very
good miner at all. And he also started investing in
(10:17):
timber and silver and gold stocks at this point. And
you know, we talked about his father's belief in prospecting. Uh.
Mark Twain was also or Clemens, still at this point
was not a good businessman, but part of this experience
when he was mining um went into his book roughing it,
(10:40):
so it was good for his literary career, if not
for his pocketbook. And during this time he also starts
writing letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which are
so impressive they catch the attention of the editor who
offers him a job as a reporter. He takes on
his third apprenticeship in life Um and starts to be
(11:05):
a journalist and people started to know Mark Twain's name
in eighteen sixty five when he published a short story
called Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which got picked
up by papers all across the country and people loved it. Yeah,
it was a story he learned while mining. Actually, so
his varied work experience influenced his writings lucrative in a
(11:28):
different way. And he got hired at a different paper
and started a sort of travel writing career which again
ended up being very lucrative for him, and he was
able to publish the account later as Innocence Abroad in
eighteen sixty nine, and that was also his traveling during
(11:49):
that time also had another important effect in that he
met Olivia Langdon, who would become his wife. And I
am kind of obsessed with her, as was he, so
I'm really excited about this. She was the daughter of
a wealthy cole merchant. Their family was very progressive, they
were abolitionists, and he once referred to her as my faithful,
(12:10):
judicious and painstaking editor. He was very very much in
love with her his whole life, and Sarah and I
found a bunch of letters between him and his wife
on Mark Twain project dot org, where you can go
read and say all the sweet things to each other.
He makes his first attempt at a novel in eighteen
seventy three. The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer came out
(12:32):
in eighteen seventy six, which has not ever gone out
of print. It's an extremely popular book still today. Yeah,
and Clemmens was actually so taken by the character Huck
Finn and Tom Sawyer that he decided that Huck needed
his own narrative and started to write Huck Finn's autobiography
(12:53):
the same summer that Tom Sawyer was published, and decided
pretty quickly too, that it needed to be written in
Huck's own dialect, and he worked on Huck Finn, which
I think most people would consider his masterpiece. He worked
on it for years and years and would take on
(13:14):
other projects, and he didn't actually publish it until and
Ernest Hemingway said of Huck Finn, all modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn
and then goes on to say there was nothing before,
there has been nothing good since. So those are pretty
high accolades for a book. And also, like this man,
(13:36):
Hal Holbrook, who starred in a one man stage show
of Mark Twain, so you know, he obviously had a
pretty intimate understanding of Mark Twain playing him for years,
wrote that he made American speech something to be admired.
And I think that's a really good point. If you
haven't read Hook Finn, I would recommend that you do so,
but of course I'm an English major, so I would.
(13:58):
But the dialect is really interesting to read, and you
you do, it does something to the book because you
couldn't have gotten other It's not trying to be like
anything else. No, and it really did seem like the
first thing that it was so just truly through and
through truly American. So he moves to Europe for a
while and publishes him more books, A Tramp Abroad and
(14:18):
The Prince and the Pauper among them. And he also
travels at the Mississippi and starts taking notes for Life
on the Mississippi, talking about Mississippi's um. But he also
starts making pretty bad investments at this point, even more
(14:38):
bad investments, especially his support for James Page, who was
working on an automatic type setting machine. This is the
worst thing ever he committed over the years. He committed
like a couple to two hundred thousand dollars fortune between
eighteen eighty and eighteen ninety four to this machine. There's
(14:59):
um there. It actually is one in the Mark Twain
House Museum, but they're afraid to ever take it apart
because no one might be able to put it back
together again because it was notoriously finicky. And he was
riding so high. At this point he has a successful
biography of Ulysses Grant, and he writes Connecticut Yankee and
King Arthur's Court. Um. He actually thinks that that's going
(15:22):
to be his quote swan song to literature, because he
thinks his investments are all about to really, you know,
start bringing in the big money. He thought this machine,
he's quoted saying he thought it would be bigger than
the train, the telephone, or the cotton gin. And it
turned out that the Lena type machine came out and
made it immediately. Yeah. So uh, Clemmens goes into huge
(15:49):
debt manages to transfer the rights of his literature to
his wife, Happy rights to Livy, which I think he
originally didn't want to do. He thought he would just
sell those and get them out of debt. And she
was the one who kept trying to convince him not to,
saying that was their investment in the copyrights, and of
course she was right, So he transferred his money to
(16:11):
her and declared personal bankruptcy in eighteen ninety four. He
was really bad with money. He kept investing with all
the wrong people and just spending it in ways that
don't make sense from a business perspective. And so since
it's forced to keep working, he starts to think more
about his legacy and tries to cultivate a serious tone,
(16:33):
but can't. He can't. By this point, he can't get
away from the Mark Twain humorous persona right, that's how
what people wanted him to be. When they saw him,
and when they read him, they wanted him to be funny.
And a lot of tragedies start happening at this point
in his life too. In his daughter Susie dies of
(16:56):
spinal meningitis. She was only twenty four, I think, and
it was absolutely heartbreaking for both him and for Livy,
and they'd said they never got over it. They had
three daughters, and you know, despite despite him being away
traveling a lot, he was very attached to them, extremely
attached to all the women in his life. Actually he
(17:16):
had also they had had a young son named Langdon,
who died I think when he was only nineteen months
old of ditheria. So this wasn't the first sad thing
to happen to their family. Um. But soon after Susie died,
his another daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with epilepsy UM and
the family spent a lot of time and money traveling
(17:36):
to different doctors looking for a cure for her, which
they didn't find. UM. But to offset some of the
sad stuff, I found a list of books they had
in their library that their family enjoyed reading, which made
me happy. Through the looking glass, Uncle Remus Robin Hood,
Little Lord Fauntleroy, which Sarah said she didn't know it
was an actual book. I thought it was an outfit
(17:57):
Uncle Tom's cabin, and the whole family liked reading to
other Um Cole Ridge, Kipling, Shelley Tennyson, and longfellow Um
Livy really liked Jane Austen, but Mark Twain was having
none out of it. He really didn't like her. Um
and he starts to, you know, sort of put his
finances back in order at this point, mostly thanks to
(18:19):
the help of Henry Huddleson Rogers, who was a standard
oil man who helped him invest and also start building
up this reputation as a moral character that we we
associate with him now, somebody who you can go to
for these quotes that might be a little colorful or funny,
(18:42):
but they they kind of take a real strict moral
stand on something. Well, yeah, a lot of them start
to get very political after certain points, really anti imperialist,
and I think he was vice president of the Anti
Imperialist Society for a long time time. And he was
also against anti Semitism and slavery and was very vocal.
(19:07):
He was he was extremely vocal about the Belgian rule
in Congo. Actually he wrote up an essay regarding King
Leopold and Congo that was so intense that it wasn't
published anywhere, and he got in trouble for some of
these stances. He gave a really I guess sarcastic introduction
(19:29):
of Winston Churchill once and people were scandalized because a
lot of these essays are so hardline moral. A lot
of people called this period his bad mood of period,
which was a bit simplistic. I think that's not what
he was going for. Yeah, he was just trying to
shake off a little of the lightness of some of
(19:51):
his earlier work, and that that world lecture tour made
him rich again. It was grueling, but he did make
quite a bit of money on it, and actually, for
some people, I think became more famous for his speaking
than for his actual writing. And he pockets a few
honored degrees on the way too from Oxford. That was
his favorite one. He liked to wear the gown around
(20:12):
the place. He did. I think he wore one of
them in his daughter's wedding. Yeah, that might signal bad
turn for him. To wear your fancy, ornamental gown when
your daughter's in her wedding dress, I would say. But
in nineteen o four, Livvy dies in Italy. She's been
sick for a long time. She was an invalid and
again the love of his life. So this was huge
(20:35):
for him. In his autobiography he says, and I quote,
she was my life and she has gone. She was
my riches and I am a pauper. He was absolutely
devastated when she died. They've been staying in this sa
villa that he hated, and he kept thinking if he
got her somewhere else, you know, found the perfect palazzo
that she would be okay. And he found it and
went into her bedroom that night to tell her about
(20:56):
it and remembers her smiling, and then she died the
next morning. So he writes Eve's Diary for her, and
he tended to write poems or pieces of literature for
the women in his life as they started to die
(21:17):
up to memorialize them. And his daughter Jean died a
few years after that in n nine. I think connected
to her applette. She had a heart attack during an
epileptic seizure um and this sort of plunges him into
his last despair with you know, most of his family
(21:42):
is dead. By this point. He has one surviving daughter,
but she's left. She's left married and moved to Europe
um and so Clemens ends up going to Bermuda after
Jean has been buried, because through Muda with his biographer,
(22:02):
and his last writing was actually humorous, back to his
old style kind of uh called Etiquette for the Afterlife
advised pain. And one of the last things he wrote
um was death the only immortal who treats us all alike?
Whose pity and whose peace and whose revenger for all
the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor,
(22:23):
the loved and the unloved. And he writes in his
autobiography of being at the funeral of Gene and knowing
that he's going to die soon after that he was
pretty convinced that it wouldn't be long, and he did.
He did no more than four months afterwards. I think
my favorite quote about him is actually from Livy and
(22:46):
one of her letters, when she wrote, life is not
so interesting when you're away, because from everything we've learned,
it sounds like that's pretty spot on the Mark Twain.
So if you'd like to learn more about Mark Twain
and other literary great Please check out our website and
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(23:08):
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blog on the how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.
How are you, Sarah? I'm well, how are you, Katie good.
I'm going to start you off with a quote today
(00:22):
by a very famous man, and you can guess who
it is. Okay, man is a marvelous curiosity. When he's
at his very very best, he is a sort of
low grade nickel plated angel. At his worst, he's unspeakable, unimaginable,
and first and last and all the time, he's a sarcasm.
I'm gonna hazard. That was Mark Twain Bingo. So today
(00:45):
we're talking about Mark Twain, mr. Literary genius, and we'll
start with his childhood as we do. Samuel Langhorne Clemens
was born in Florida, Missouri, in eighteen thirty five. UM.
He was premature and pretty thickly for the first ten
years of his life, which contributed a lot to how
(01:07):
his personality developed. He had to stay inside with his mother,
so he was kind of coddled, but he liked to
rebel with little acts of mischief, and you know, it
was a sweet, good natured kid though. Um. And he
also had a lot of remedies that his mother would
(01:30):
try to, you know, perform on him, which might have
added to kind of some quackery. The guinea pig child
happened later in life. He was one of seven kids.
I think he was number six of the seven um Orion, Pamela, Pleasant, Margaret, Benjamin,
and Henry. And only three of them I believe lived
(01:52):
out of childhood, and obviously Samuel was one of them.
His parents had a courteous but not a warm may
Ridge he has said, yeah, and um. When he was
a few years old, Uh, the family's fortunes kind of
started to change and they were forced to move to Hannibal, Missouri,
(02:13):
on the Mississippi River. Um. And another thing he would
talk about is he you know, he was kind of poor,
but the family had this unsettling belief that they would
come into money. His father owned some property in Tennessee,
which I'm not sure why, but he believed that would
(02:33):
be his fortune in the end. And he he later
said that it's a fine thing to grow up rich.
It's a fine thing to grow up poor, that's wholesome,
But to grow up perspectively, rich is not a healthy state. Well,
and kind of in between the two, even having the
prospect of it behind you and also in front of you. Yeah,
it may not give you the most healthy attitude toward money, which,
(02:55):
as we'll see later, definitely affected him. Yeah, but Hannibal
was a nice place for a kid to grow up
for a lot of ways. It had a lot of
fun outdoor pursuits, and some of his favorite boyhood sites
like Glasgow's Island and McDowell's Cave later appear in his writing. Um,
(03:17):
and as a boy he also read a lot James Fenimore, Cooper,
Sir Walter Scott. He played Robin Hood and pirates with
his friends. Um, but it wasn't all super picturesque. So
you're telling me some gruesome stories this morning and looking
over your notes, and it's it's a little disturbing. Yeah,
(03:39):
he uh. You know, Hannibal was sometimes a rather violent town,
and just in his childhood he found a corpse in
his father's office. We should say his father was a
justice of the peace, so not quite as bad as
it sounds. But he saw a man who was shot
to die in the street. He watched a friend drowned
(04:01):
and he found a few days after that, he found
a drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. So
that all sounds like a pretty traumatic childhood, but maybe
it's par for the chorus for a boundary state. At
the time, I don't know. And I had read a
story about his family owned a slave, Jenny, who acted
as their nursemaid, and he saw her brutally whipped when
(04:24):
he was about six after a little altercation with his mother.
So the slavery stuff will figure in his works as well. Yeah,
and he was also influenced. During his summers, he'd go
back to Florida, Missouri to stay with his uncle, and
he and his cousins would be told tales by a
(04:44):
slave called Uncle Daniel, who ended up being in part
a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. And another little
fact I like about his childhood was that he was
a sleepwalker. One night, when he was sleepwalking, he apparently
went to sister's room and picked up the edge of
her covers, which was supposed to be superstitiously a sign
(05:07):
that someone was going to die, and she did die
the next day, which led everyone in his family to
think that he had the second sight, and that was
another thing that stayed with him, that idea of paranormal activity.
And he was interested in science and invention. You know,
it seems later in life too, he takes responsibility for
death that clearly are not I wonder if that it
(05:30):
started way back then. But like most you know, young
boys at the time, he takes an apprenticeship and works
for a printer. And one story I really enjoy about
his apprenticeship that he tells in his autobiography, which I
would highly recommend. I've read the Charles Needer version, although
there are a few of them out there. Um. But
(05:52):
when he was working as a printer's apprentice to make
something fit a sermon, they put j C in for
Jesus Christ. And you know, obviously the printer thought that
was disrespectful and told them they had better put the
full name every single time they would not be abbreviating it.
And so, just to be a jerk, he put Jesus H.
(06:12):
Christ and all in all instances and gotten quite a
bit of trouble. But you know, his his printing career
kind of got off to a start maybe after that
despite that. Uh, and he was fortunate enough to have
an older brother who was already established in printing and publishing. Um.
(06:35):
He his brother Orion bought the Hannibal Journal, and uh,
Samuel contributed sketches and articles as well as you know,
doing type studying and printing work. And isn't that I
think that's the first time he used a pseudonym. It
is and his first pseudonym. This might be mangled here,
(06:57):
but w et the note. Nanda's justice Perkins. We've had
a lot of troubles with their names because the entire
time we thought Orion was a Ryan and Pamela was Pamela.
We were wrong. His mother liked different um, she liked
different lats definitely, So, Sarah, as you have said, Mark
(07:22):
Twain had entirely too many jobs for you to remember.
So he went on from this newspaper job and started
working at printing shops and was also writing, and then
he went to South America. He was planning to go
to South America. Sounds like kind of a crazy scheme,
but he was going to take a steamboat in eighteen
(07:45):
fifty seven to New Orleans and then from there going
to South America. But he never made it because he
was so fascinated by the steamboat, got talking to the
captain and persuaded the captain to take him on as
a steamboat pilot apprentice, which ended up being one of
his favorite jobs. He absolutely loved it. The freedom and um,
(08:10):
technical skill and discipline that came with being a pilot. Well,
and if you got your pilot license, I think you were.
It was a pretty lucrative job. Although it was it
was tough. You had to know all the different depths
and marks and everything of the river, which was not easy.
This is also when he first hears the name Mark Twain.
(08:31):
He lampoons a senior pilot, Isaiah Sellars, who had published
some very short, to the point observations of life on
the Mississippi and weather and very straightforward things. Uh. And
even though Clemens kind of mocked him, he really liked
(08:53):
this guy's pen name, and so he kept it. He
did his own to his credit, when he started using
the pen name Mark Twain, he thought that Isaiah Sellers
was dead. Not true, because somebody stole your pen name.
Don't steal mine, Sarah. He had to leave steamboat piloting.
I think you and I had found different things. I
(09:14):
found that it was because um, the war was breaking
out and the business was drying up, and I think
you found something. I heard that he was a little
worried he'd be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, which
and at some point I think he was part of
a Confederate unit, so I don't think he would have
enjoyed that well. His his allegiance during the Civil War
(09:34):
is a little questionable, though he has his older brother
Orion was actually a really strong Lincoln supporter, so I guess,
like any um border state like that, he kind of
cane in the middle. He quit the Marian Rangers, which
was the volunteer Confederate unit, after two weeks, so apparently
(09:56):
wasn't not dedicated to At this point point, he took
yet another job and decided that he would go mind
some silver. Who would really like to see Mark Twain's resume.
I think there would be some gaps and there It
might be hard to explain, but he wasn't a very
good miner at all. And he also started investing in
(10:17):
timber and silver and gold stocks at this point. And
you know, we talked about his father's belief in prospecting. Uh.
Mark Twain was also or Clemens, still at this point
was not a good businessman, but part of this experience
when he was mining um went into his book roughing it,
(10:40):
so it was good for his literary career, if not
for his pocketbook. And during this time he also starts
writing letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which are
so impressive they catch the attention of the editor who
offers him a job as a reporter. He takes on
his third apprenticeship in life Um and starts to be
(11:05):
a journalist and people started to know Mark Twain's name
in eighteen sixty five when he published a short story
called Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which got picked
up by papers all across the country and people loved it. Yeah,
it was a story he learned while mining. Actually, so
his varied work experience influenced his writings lucrative in a
(11:28):
different way. And he got hired at a different paper
and started a sort of travel writing career which again
ended up being very lucrative for him, and he was
able to publish the account later as Innocence Abroad in
eighteen sixty nine, and that was also his traveling during
(11:49):
that time also had another important effect in that he
met Olivia Langdon, who would become his wife. And I
am kind of obsessed with her, as was he, so
I'm really excited about this. She was the daughter of
a wealthy cole merchant. Their family was very progressive, they
were abolitionists, and he once referred to her as my faithful,
(12:10):
judicious and painstaking editor. He was very very much in
love with her his whole life, and Sarah and I
found a bunch of letters between him and his wife
on Mark Twain project dot org, where you can go
read and say all the sweet things to each other.
He makes his first attempt at a novel in eighteen
seventy three. The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer came out
(12:32):
in eighteen seventy six, which has not ever gone out
of print. It's an extremely popular book still today. Yeah,
and Clemmens was actually so taken by the character Huck
Finn and Tom Sawyer that he decided that Huck needed
his own narrative and started to write Huck Finn's autobiography
(12:53):
the same summer that Tom Sawyer was published, and decided
pretty quickly too, that it needed to be written in
Huck's own dialect, and he worked on Huck Finn, which
I think most people would consider his masterpiece. He worked
on it for years and years and would take on
(13:14):
other projects, and he didn't actually publish it until and
Ernest Hemingway said of Huck Finn, all modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn
and then goes on to say there was nothing before,
there has been nothing good since. So those are pretty
high accolades for a book. And also, like this man,
(13:36):
Hal Holbrook, who starred in a one man stage show
of Mark Twain, so you know, he obviously had a
pretty intimate understanding of Mark Twain playing him for years,
wrote that he made American speech something to be admired.
And I think that's a really good point. If you
haven't read Hook Finn, I would recommend that you do so,
but of course I'm an English major, so I would.
(13:58):
But the dialect is really interesting to read, and you
you do, it does something to the book because you
couldn't have gotten other It's not trying to be like
anything else. No, and it really did seem like the
first thing that it was so just truly through and
through truly American. So he moves to Europe for a
while and publishes him more books, A Tramp Abroad and
(14:18):
The Prince and the Pauper among them. And he also
travels at the Mississippi and starts taking notes for Life
on the Mississippi, talking about Mississippi's um. But he also
starts making pretty bad investments at this point, even more
(14:38):
bad investments, especially his support for James Page, who was
working on an automatic type setting machine. This is the
worst thing ever he committed over the years. He committed
like a couple to two hundred thousand dollars fortune between
eighteen eighty and eighteen ninety four to this machine. There's
(14:59):
um there. It actually is one in the Mark Twain
House Museum, but they're afraid to ever take it apart
because no one might be able to put it back
together again because it was notoriously finicky. And he was
riding so high. At this point he has a successful
biography of Ulysses Grant, and he writes Connecticut Yankee and
King Arthur's Court. Um. He actually thinks that that's going
(15:22):
to be his quote swan song to literature, because he
thinks his investments are all about to really, you know,
start bringing in the big money. He thought this machine,
he's quoted saying he thought it would be bigger than
the train, the telephone, or the cotton gin. And it
turned out that the Lena type machine came out and
made it immediately. Yeah. So uh, Clemmens goes into huge
(15:49):
debt manages to transfer the rights of his literature to
his wife, Happy rights to Livy, which I think he
originally didn't want to do. He thought he would just
sell those and get them out of debt. And she
was the one who kept trying to convince him not to,
saying that was their investment in the copyrights, and of
course she was right, So he transferred his money to
(16:11):
her and declared personal bankruptcy in eighteen ninety four. He
was really bad with money. He kept investing with all
the wrong people and just spending it in ways that
don't make sense from a business perspective. And so since
it's forced to keep working, he starts to think more
about his legacy and tries to cultivate a serious tone,
(16:33):
but can't. He can't. By this point, he can't get
away from the Mark Twain humorous persona right, that's how
what people wanted him to be. When they saw him,
and when they read him, they wanted him to be funny.
And a lot of tragedies start happening at this point
in his life too. In his daughter Susie dies of
(16:56):
spinal meningitis. She was only twenty four, I think, and
it was absolutely heartbreaking for both him and for Livy,
and they'd said they never got over it. They had
three daughters, and you know, despite despite him being away
traveling a lot, he was very attached to them, extremely
attached to all the women in his life. Actually he
(17:16):
had also they had had a young son named Langdon,
who died I think when he was only nineteen months
old of ditheria. So this wasn't the first sad thing
to happen to their family. Um. But soon after Susie died,
his another daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with epilepsy UM and
the family spent a lot of time and money traveling
(17:36):
to different doctors looking for a cure for her, which
they didn't find. UM. But to offset some of the
sad stuff, I found a list of books they had
in their library that their family enjoyed reading, which made
me happy. Through the looking glass, Uncle Remus Robin Hood,
Little Lord Fauntleroy, which Sarah said she didn't know it
was an actual book. I thought it was an outfit
(17:57):
Uncle Tom's cabin, and the whole family liked reading to
other Um Cole Ridge, Kipling, Shelley Tennyson, and longfellow Um
Livy really liked Jane Austen, but Mark Twain was having
none out of it. He really didn't like her. Um
and he starts to, you know, sort of put his
finances back in order at this point, mostly thanks to
(18:19):
the help of Henry Huddleson Rogers, who was a standard
oil man who helped him invest and also start building
up this reputation as a moral character that we we
associate with him now, somebody who you can go to
for these quotes that might be a little colorful or funny,
(18:42):
but they they kind of take a real strict moral
stand on something. Well, yeah, a lot of them start
to get very political after certain points, really anti imperialist,
and I think he was vice president of the Anti
Imperialist Society for a long time time. And he was
also against anti Semitism and slavery and was very vocal.
(19:07):
He was he was extremely vocal about the Belgian rule
in Congo. Actually he wrote up an essay regarding King
Leopold and Congo that was so intense that it wasn't
published anywhere, and he got in trouble for some of
these stances. He gave a really I guess sarcastic introduction
(19:29):
of Winston Churchill once and people were scandalized because a
lot of these essays are so hardline moral. A lot
of people called this period his bad mood of period,
which was a bit simplistic. I think that's not what
he was going for. Yeah, he was just trying to
shake off a little of the lightness of some of
(19:51):
his earlier work, and that that world lecture tour made
him rich again. It was grueling, but he did make
quite a bit of money on it, and actually, for
some people, I think became more famous for his speaking
than for his actual writing. And he pockets a few
honored degrees on the way too from Oxford. That was
his favorite one. He liked to wear the gown around
(20:12):
the place. He did. I think he wore one of
them in his daughter's wedding. Yeah, that might signal bad
turn for him. To wear your fancy, ornamental gown when
your daughter's in her wedding dress, I would say. But
in nineteen o four, Livvy dies in Italy. She's been
sick for a long time. She was an invalid and
again the love of his life. So this was huge
(20:35):
for him. In his autobiography he says, and I quote,
she was my life and she has gone. She was
my riches and I am a pauper. He was absolutely
devastated when she died. They've been staying in this sa
villa that he hated, and he kept thinking if he
got her somewhere else, you know, found the perfect palazzo
that she would be okay. And he found it and
went into her bedroom that night to tell her about
(20:56):
it and remembers her smiling, and then she died the
next morning. So he writes Eve's Diary for her, and
he tended to write poems or pieces of literature for
the women in his life as they started to die
(21:17):
up to memorialize them. And his daughter Jean died a
few years after that in n nine. I think connected
to her applette. She had a heart attack during an
epileptic seizure um and this sort of plunges him into
his last despair with you know, most of his family
(21:42):
is dead. By this point. He has one surviving daughter,
but she's left. She's left married and moved to Europe
um and so Clemens ends up going to Bermuda after
Jean has been buried, because through Muda with his biographer,
(22:02):
and his last writing was actually humorous, back to his
old style kind of uh called Etiquette for the Afterlife
advised pain. And one of the last things he wrote
um was death the only immortal who treats us all alike?
Whose pity and whose peace and whose revenger for all
the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor,
(22:23):
the loved and the unloved. And he writes in his
autobiography of being at the funeral of Gene and knowing
that he's going to die soon after that he was
pretty convinced that it wouldn't be long, and he did.
He did no more than four months afterwards. I think
my favorite quote about him is actually from Livy and
(22:46):
one of her letters, when she wrote, life is not
so interesting when you're away, because from everything we've learned,
it sounds like that's pretty spot on the Mark Twain.
So if you'd like to learn more about Mark Twain
and other literary great Please check out our website and
the Stuff you Missed to History blog at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
(23:08):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
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