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Life and Times of Mark Twain(1835-1910)

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• In 1835, Samuel Clemens was born in a two-room rented shack in Florida, Missouri, about 35 miles southeast of Hannibal.

Clemens poses in front of his parents’ rented home in Florida, Mo. The original location is marked by a red granite monument.

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• Samuel was born two months premature, and he was so thin and sickly that his mother remarked, “I could see no promise in him.”

• Halley’s Comet blazed in the sky the night of his birth, and his mother clung to the hope that it might be a bright omen for her baby’s future.

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When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi River, much like the towns in Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Twain stands in front of his boyhood home.

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• Samuel Clemens had a favorite word whenever he described his boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri: drowsing. He meant that it was a place halfway between sleeping and awake, a lazy outpost on the Mississippi River, where he and his friends lived in a world of straw hats, corn-cob pipes, trout fishing, playing hooky, and watching steamboats ply the river.

Tom Sawyer Days1835-53

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• Clemens would later call these his “Tom Sawyer days,” a time when he himself pulled many of the pranks he later attributed to his young hero.

• He lived there from the age of four to fifteen, and he relived those days for the rest of his life in books like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi.

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Clemen’s Father Dies• His father provided a fairly affluent lifestyle that

included a number of household slaves. • The death of Clemens’s father in 1847, however,

left the family in hardship. • Clemens left school, worked for a printer, and, in

1851, having finished his apprenticeship, began to set type for his brother Orion’s newspaper, The Hannibal Journal.

• Hannibal proved too small to hold Clemens, who soon became a sort of itinerant printer and found work in a number of American cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

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A Printer’s Apprentice

• The earliest known portrait of Sam Clemens, a daguerreotype made when he was fifteen and working as a printer’s apprentice.

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• “When I was a boy,” said Clemens in the Atlantic Monthly, “there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steam boat man.” And the highest of all steam boat men was the pilot, the cool-headed hero responsible for navigating the river’s ever-shifting channels.

Old Times on the Mississippi1853-60

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Life on the River

• At the age of 21, Clemens became a “cub” for the famed pilot Horace Bixby.

• He spent the next two years memorizing the entire river from St. Louis to New Orleans, eventually getting a pilot’s license himself.

• It brought a big salary, fine cigars, and kid gloves; Clemens thought he would never need another career.

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• Perhaps most important, the riverboat life provided Clemens with the pen name Mark Twain, derived from the riverboat leadsmen’s signal—“By the mark, twain”—that the water was deep enough for safe passage.

Mark Twain

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• Life on the river also gave Twain material for several of his books, including the raft scenes of Huckleberry Finn and the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883).

• Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861, when the Civil War exploded across America and shut down the Mississippi for travel and shipping.

• Although Clemens joined a Confederate cavalry division, he was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted en masse, he did too.

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• Clemens then made his way west with his brother Orion, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling into his true calling, journalism.

• The freewheeling journalism of the Far West suited Clemens just fine. Serious news was often mixed with “reports” that had to be taken with a grain—if not a gallon—of salt.

• Soon, he began using the name Mark Twain and affixing it to sketches, reportage, and an occasional hoax.

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The Gilded Age 1869-71

• At 34 years of age, Clemens entered into the longest and most faithful contract of his life: his marriage to Olivia Langdon. She was the daughter of a New York coal magnate, a member of the country’s wealthy elite.

• For a poor boy from the West, who had seen the world from bottom up, this was such high society that he often felt like “Little Sammy in Fairy Land.”

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• Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married on Feb. 2, 1870.

• Winning Livy meant far more than a status change for Clemens. She would be partner, editor, and fellow traveler in success and failure for the next thirty-five years.

• She would also furnish him her family’s home in Elmira, New York, a place where he visited often and wrote many of his best-loved books,

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The Beginning of Huck Finn

• Twain began writing Huck's novel in the summer of 1876, in his study at Quarry Farm. This was even before Tom Sawyer was published in America. He didn't finish it, however, until 1884. Huck Finn took him longer than any other book to write. "If I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book," Huck says in the novel's last paragraph, "I wouldn't a tackled it."

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Huckleberry Finn• This new novel took on a more

serious character than much of Twain’s other work, as Twain focused increasingly on the institution of slavery and the South.

• Twain soon set Huckleberry Finn aside, perhaps because its darker tone did not fit the optimistic sentiments of the Gilded Age. In the early 1880s, however, the hopefulness of the post-Civil War years began to fade.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Picaresque novel (episodic, colorful story often in the form of a quest or journey);

• Satire of popular adventure and romance novels;

• Bildungsroman (novel of education or moral development)

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Elements of the Novel

• Point of view  · Huck’s point of view, although Twain occasionally indulges in digressions in which he shows off his own ironic wit

• Tone  · Frequently ironic or mocking, particularly concerning adventure -novels and romances; also contemplative, as Huck seeks to decipher the world around him; sometimes boyish and exuberant

• Tense · Immediate past

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• Setting (time) · Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845; Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before the time of its publication

• Setting (place)  · The Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri; various locations along the river through Arkansas

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Themes and Motifs• Themes · Racism and slavery; intellectual and

moral education; the hypocrisy of “civilized” society

• Motifs · Childhood; lies and cons; superstitions and folk beliefs; parodies of popular romance novels

• Symbols · Mississippi River; floods; shipwrecks; the natural world

• Foreshadowing · Parallels and juxtapositions rather than explicit foreshadowing, especially in comparisons between Huck’s plight and eventual escape and Jim’s plight and eventual escape

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The Journey

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• Meanwhile, Twain’s personal life began to collapse. His wife had long been sickly, and the couple lost their first son after just nineteen months. Twain also made a number of poor investments and financial decisions and, in 1891, found himself mired in debilitating debt. As his personal fortune dwindled, he continued to devote himself to writing.

• Drawing from his personal plight and the prevalent national troubles of the day, he finished a draft of Huckleberry Finn in 1883, and by 1884 had it ready for publication. The novel met with great public and critical acclaim.

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Controversy

• Through the twentieth century, the novel has become famous not merely as the crown jewel in the work of one of America’s preeminent writers, but also as a subject of intense controversy.

• The novel occasionally has been banned in Southern states because of its steadfastly critical take on the South and the hypocrisies of slavery.

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ALA List of Most Challenged Books

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz 2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite 3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling 8. Forever by Judy Blume 9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson 10.Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor 11.Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman

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Huckleberry FinnHuckleberry Finn

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 1935

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Huck’s Reception

• Others have dismissed Huckleberry Finn as vulgar or racist because it uses the word “nigger,” a term whose connotations obscure the novel’s deeper themes—which are unequivocally antislavery—and even prevent some from reading and enjoying it altogether.

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Huck’s Reception• The fact that the historical context in which

Twain wrote made his use of the word insignificant—and, indeed, part of the realism he wanted to create—offers little solace to some modern readers.

• Ultimately, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has proved significant not only as a novel that explores the racial and moral world of its time but also, through the controversies that continue to surround it, as an artifact of those same moral and racial tensions as they have evolved to the present day.

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Trials, Tribulations

• Personal tragedy also continued to hound Twain: his finances remained troublesome, and within the course of a few years, his wife and two of his daughters passed away. Twain’s writing from this period until the end of his life reflects a depression and a sort of righteous rage at the injustices of the world.

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Twain was a speaker and traveled on lecture circuits, much in demand. His early performances combined humor, information and eloquence in measures that delighted most people.

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•By 1900 Twain had become America’s foremost celebrity. Reporters met him at every port of call, anxious to print a new quip from the famous humorist.

•To enhance his image, he took to wearing white suits and loved to stroll down the street and see people staring at him.

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Later life

• Despite his personal troubles, Twain continued to enjoy immense esteem and fame and continued to be in demand as a public speaker until his death in 1910.

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Clemens Timeline