Son
of a Comet, Star of the West:
The Life and Literature of “Mark Twain”
Bibliography | Twain
in PBO | Teaching Resources | Related Online Resources
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pbw01007
Mark Twain: The Story of his Life and Work
(Clemens Publishing, 1892)
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Although Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote
as Mark Twain, he could hardly separate himself from the
tales he told. Most of the books and articles he published
were drawn from his life. Many of them were nonfiction
accounts of his exploits, several were fictional stories
based on his experiences, and others–both fact and
fantasy– incorporated commentary or criticism on
broader events of the time in which he lived.
Born as Haley’s Comet crossed the
sky in November 1835, Clemens grew up in the frontier town
of Hannibal,
Missouri. Clemens was the sixth of John and Jane Clemens’ seven
children. Clemens would outlive all of them: his sister
Margaret and brothers Peasant and Benjamin failed to survive
childhood; his brother Henry died in a steamboat explosion
at the age of 20. Clemens’ brother Orion died in
1897; his sister Pamela, in 1904.
The Newspaper Bug Bites
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pbw00964
Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old
(American Publishing, 1875)
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Missouri was a young state during Clemens'
childhood. He spent much of his youth playing in the slave
quarters on his uncle’s farm and admiring the nearby
Mississippi
River. Clemens’ boyhood dream was to
become a steamboatman. The dream would come true eventually,
but it was his writing career for which he was known. He
began that occupation as a teenager.
Clemens attended school
through the fifth grade, when his father’s death forced him into work as an errand
boy for the Hannibal Gazette. After a two-year apprenticeship
at the Hannibal Courier, he began working as a writer,
printer, and occasional editor at his brother Orion’s
Hannibal Western Union.
Clemens longed for something bigger
and began his search for it in 1851 by publishing sketches
in the Saturday Evening
Post. The following year, he worked as a printer in St.
Louis, Philadelphia and New York, sending travel sketches
back home to the Hannibal Journal. He then briefly rejoined
his brother Orion in Iowa, where he had begun the Keokuk
Journal.
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pba02262
Life on the Mississippi
(J. R. Osgood, 1883)
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Life on the Mississippi Gives
Twain his Name
Still yearning for life on the river,
Clemens set out for New
Orleans, where he met steamboat
pilot Horace
Bixby. Clemens convinced Bixby to let him
apprentice for two years, after which he got his pilot’s
license. However, his steamboat career came to an abrupt
halt in 1861, when the Civil
War suspended traffic on the
Mississippi.
Although Clemens trained for two weeks
with a volunteer militia group called the Marion
Rangers,
he never
saw battle.
Instead, he traveled west with Orion, who had been appointed
by President Abraham
Lincoln as secretary of the Nevada
Territory. At first, the thought of riches intrigued Clemens,
and he wandered the region’s prospecting sites searching
for silver. When that didn’t pan out, he became a
reporter at the Virginia City (Nev.) Territorial Enterprise,
to which he had been sending humorous letters. In 1863,
he
adopted the pen name Mark Twain, a riverboat term meaning
the line between safe and dangerous water.
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pbw01005
The Jumping Frog
(Harper and Bros., 1903)
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Twain's
Travels
After challenging a rival editor to a
duel, Clemens again was on the move, this time
to San Francisco. During his four years there, he served
as
the Enterprise’s Pacific correspondent and
wrote for several California publications. In 1866, he
discovered
another talent–public speaking. He organized a
lecture series based on the popular “Sandwich Island” letters he had written during a trip to what is now Hawaii, and
the success of the lectures prompted him to schedule a
speaking tour throughout Nevada and California. The tour
soon extended to the Midwest and New York.
During this time,
Clemens published his first book. The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Sketches featured the humorous essay “Jim Smiley
and his Jumping Frog,” based on California
Gold Rush folklore. Thanks to the book, his lectures, and popular
letters written during a trip to Europe, Russia, and the
Middle East, Clemens was becoming well-known. His notoriety
led a New York book publisher to ask Clemens to collect
his travel letters into a second book, The Innocents
Abroad.
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pba02270
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(American Publishing, 1892)
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Family Life
Clemens finally began to settle down in
1870, when he married Olivia “Livy” Landgon and
moved to Elmira,
New York. However, life was far from quiet.
He
worked
as
an editor
at
the
Buffalo
Express, contributed to the New York Galaxy literary
magazine, and wrote the book Roughing
It about
his experiences in
the west. In addition, his new family endured three tragedies
in a short time: the death of Livy’s father, the
death of Livy’s close friend while staying at the
Clemens’ home, and the death of the couple’s
two-year-old son Langdon.
The couple sought a fresh start
and settled in Hartford,
Conn., where their family and
Clemens’ literary
career steadily grew. Between 1872 and 1880, they had three
daughters: Susy, Clara, and Jean. Professionally, Clemens
teamed with Hartford Courant publisher
Charles
Dudley Warner to pen The Gilded Age, which
criticized material excess and political corruption. While
telling humorous stories
about characters based on his childhood friends The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn commented
on slavery and Reconstruction. During the 1880s, Clemens
also published the European travel book A Tramp Abroad;
Life on the Mississippi, about the river and steamboat
pilots; and two pieces of historical fiction with a twist.
The Prince and the Pauper featured commentary
on class relations, and the cynical A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court attacked oppression while exploring technological
advancement.
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pbw00969
The £1,000,000 Bank-note and Other
New Stories
(Charles L. Webster, 1893)
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Tragedy and
Debt
The peace and prosperity of the 1880s
would end in the following decade. Clemens poured tremendous
amounts of money into ventures that failed. The most notable
were the publishing company Charles
L. Webster & Company,
which went bankrupt despite the successful publication
of Ulysses
S. Grant’s memoirs, and the Paige
Compositor typesetting machine. To avoid personal bankruptcy, Clemens
sold his extravagant Hartford home and whisked his family
on a world-wide lecture tour. It was during this time that
his daughter Susy died from meningitis.
The family
returned to the United States, settling in New York. However,
Livy soon became ill and
sought a warmer climate, moving on her own to Florence,
Italy, where she died in 1904. The death of her mother
pushed Clara to a nervous breakdown.
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pba02275
Mark Twain's Autobiography
(Harper and Bros., 1924)
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A New Century Begins, A Legend's Life
Ends
Clemens remained in New York, writing
and lecturing. Numerous honors were bestowed upon him during
the early 1900s. He received honorary degrees from Yale,
Oxford, and the University
of Missouri, dined at the White
House with President Teddy
Roosevelt, and enjoyed a 70th
birthday gala at the famous Delmonico’s in New York.
Clemens finally moved to Redding, Conn.,
at a home he named Stormfield. After the tragic death of
his daughter Jean from an epileptic seizure in 1909, Clemens
wrote an homage to her and then vowed never to write again.
The end of Clemens’ life followed shortly after the
end of his career. Clemens had predicted he would go out
with Haley’s Comet–which appears every 75 years–as
he had come in with it. He turned out to be correct; he
died at Stormfield as the comet crossed the sky in April
1910.
The nation mourned the literary legend’s passing
during a large funeral procession in New York City. Clemens
was buried next to his wife and daughters at Woodlawn
Cemetery.
Bibliography (full
text available for hyperlinked titles)
Search
the PBO database for books by Mark Twain
Mark Twain Teaching Resources based on Publishers' Bindings Online
Twain for young people, K-5 lesson plan: Word
document or PDF file.
Mark Twain's commentary on society, 6-12 lesson plan: Word
document or PDF
file.
Guidelines for Book Reports: Word
document or PDF
file.
Related Online Resources
Center for Mark Twain Studies
http://www.elmira.edu/academics/ar_marktwain.shtml
Mark Twain in His Times
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html
Mark Twain House and Museum
http://www.marktwainhouse.org/
Mark Twain: A Look at the Life and Works of Samuel Clemens
http://www.hannibal.net/twain/
Mark Twain, Official Home
Page
http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/
Mark Twain Papers & Project
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/ Mark Twain, PBS
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/
Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources
http://www.twainquotes.com/
Twain's Hannibal, The Learning
Page, Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/99/twain/intro.html
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