^^^^^^^^^^
MARK TWAIN: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
Mark Twain's life illustrates a point he makes in The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer--that there is no single, simple
formula for success. A school dropout at eleven, he spent
twenty years in a variety of jobs. He was a typesetter, but, by
his own admission, not a very good one. He piloted riverboats,
but the Civil War put him out of work. He tried soldiering--and
deserted. He spent a disastrous year mining gold and silver.
In desperation, he became a newspaper reporter in Nevada.
Running afoul of the law, he fled to San Francisco, found
another newspaper job--and got fired.
Twain was thirty now, and about this time he sat in his room,
pointed a gun at his head, and contemplated pulling the trigger.
It was a good thing he held back. For he soon discovered that
he had a talent for "literature," as he wrote his brother, "of a
low order--i.e., humorous." Over the next two decades, he wrote
several books, which made him rich and world famous. Among
those books were two of America's most important contributions
to world literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Surely this is the type of startling reversal worthy of Tom
Sawyer--the boy who breaks every rule imaginable, longs for a
romantic death, and ends up a rich and revered member of his
community. How did Twain manage this feat? For an answer, you
should take a close look at the man, his art, and the times in
which he lived.
Twain was born on November 30, 1835, in the frontier hamlet
of Florida, Missouri. His parents named the sickly child, their
fifth, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (He adopted the pen name Mark
Twain in 1863.)
In 1839, John Clemens moved his family from their poor,
two-room shack in Florida to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of
the Mississippi River. Hannibal boasted only 450 citizens when
they arrived, but the town seemed destined to thrive and raise
the Clemens family's fortunes with it. Hannibal grew, but the
Clemenses did not prosper. Although John Clemens became one of
the town's most respected citizens, he went bankrupt, lost all
his property in Hannibal, and died of pneumonia in 1847. Samuel
was eleven at the time of his father's death. His mother, Jane
Clemens, took him into the room where his father's coffin lay
and made him promise to behave.
