Mark Twain Part I

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens Langhorne, who was born in Missouri in 1835.  His father was a lawyer and businessman... the family owned slaves but were never all that prosperous… He died when Samuel was about 12 and so the boy went to work as a clerk... and studied printing.  Mark loved the Mississippi river and later trained as a pilot on the steamboats that plied along the great river.   He had continued with his education during his days as a printer, studying in public libraries.  In the 1850s, he worked as a pilot, which was a well-paid and prestigious job, involving ensuring that the boats were able to navigate the river safely. However one of his brothers, Henry, who had taken a job as a general helper on one of the boats, was killed in an explosion, which traumatized Mark who had gotten him the job. (Later when he took a pen name, he used “Mark Twain” which was a cry of the pilots stating the measured river depth of two fathoms (12 feet), which was safe for a steamboat.)

Twain was a southerner and had grown up in slave states…and his great seminal works of literature, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn both were set before the Civil War and were about slavery.   It’s been said that all American literature comes from Twain’s works.  Both can be read as children’s stories but they are also adult novels.   Twain briefly joined a Confederate unit as  a volunteer, but the troop disbanded after a few weeks.   He then left and went work for his brother Orion, who was Secretary of the Nevada Territory.  He travelled west and got a job as a miner for a time, in the Nevada Silver mines. After his experiences in the west, he moved to San Francisco and became a journalist, and began to write humorous stories and accounts of his travels.   After the War, in 1868 he had an assignment to work in Europe and travelled there... He fell in love with Olivia Langdon, who was the sister of a man he met on his travels…  They corresponded for a time and finally married in 1870.  Oliva’s family was from the North and were wealthy New England liberals, and through her he met people who were left wing, idealistic campaigners for causes such as women’s rights, abolition of slavery, and socialism.  This provided him with a contrast to the southern states where he had grown up.