Mark Twain

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (30 November 1835 – 21 April 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist.

Biography

Early Life

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children of Jane Lampton, a native of Kentucky and John Marshall Clemens, a native of Virginia. When he was around four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a bustling town of 1,000 people.

Twain kept up his schooling until he was about twelve years old, when—with his father dead and the family needing a source of income—he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier, which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union, a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Then, in 1857, 21-year-old Clemens fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. A licensed pilot by 1859, he soon found regular employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river. He loved his career—it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War, which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the war began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederacy. Clemens opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years. At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Clemens knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain—steamboat slang for twelve feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style—friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious. He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles). His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip. And so it came to pass that in 1869 The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Mark Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York and Boston—a straight-laced, Victorian, moneyed group that cowed Twain. "An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind." Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

Thankfully, Mark Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

Working with the Assassins

At some point around 1863, Twain became acquainted with Horace Greeley, having worked with him in the New-York Tribune, which was founded by Greeley. During the New York City draft riots, he lived upstate with his wife, Olivia.

In 1872, Twain encountered the Pinkerton agent Tommy Greyling during a boat trip from New York City to London. The two discussed Greeley, who was a mutual friend, and his murder. Greyling had been sent from the United Kingdom to investigate the crime and Twain offered to help him after hearing about the Pieces of Eden, which Twain heard about during his travels in the Mediterranean and the Holy Land.

A few days later, Greyling and Twain partnered with Detective Frederick Abberline and the Assassins Evie Frye and Henry Green, chasing the Templar agent who tried to murder Greeley across the city. The group tried to prevent Alice from stealing pages of the Voynich manuscript hidden in the British Museum. While they ultimately failed, Greyling later cornered Alice on the boat bringing her back to America.

Twain was friends with the Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla. In 1894, Twain visited Tesla at his laboratory and experimented with the latter's Apple of Eden.

Gallery

• 
  Twain in 1872
• 
  Mark Twain connecting wires to the Apple, as Nikola Tesla looks on