Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a notorious writer and remains so to this day. Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, dedicated his life to producing infamous works of literature that are still honored and awarded today. Mark Twain’s short stories and literature works reflect his childhood and growing up experiences along the Mississippi by his strong use of dialect and language, settings, and characterization.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was the son of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens, who had seven children and Twain being the sixth of the children (Bloom 11). His family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River, which became the inspiration for the majority of his works, but his most famous work that reflects this is “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Mark Twain attended school from 1840-1849. However, around 1847 Twain began holding jobs at local newspapers, which eventually led to him leaving school and taking full time positions as a writer. Twain also became a pilot for a riverboat until the Civil War broke out causing him to lose that job. During the war and post-war years he remained with newspapers and gazettes, working towards his writing career which he is known for today (Bloom 11). Samuel Clemens eventually landed a full time position as a reporter at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprises. There he began using his pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863, which he picked up from being a pilot on a riverboat (Bloom 11).

Twain then moved to San Francisco and got another full-time job at the Saturday Press. There he published his first big story, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” which was later renamed to “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (Bloom 11). As Clemens was traveling for the Alta California (another newspaper he wrote for) he traveled to New York, then onto Europe where he met Olivia Langdon his future wife. In 1869 the publishing company Bliss published Twain’s first book, “The Innocents Abroad”, in the same year William Dean Howell became his literary advisor and remain that for the next forty years (Bloom 11).

Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon married on February 2, 1870, in Elmira, New York. Following their marriage they had their first son, Langdon Clemens, on November 7, 1870. After having their son, Twain and his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1871. In 1872 “Roughing It” was published, and in that same year Twain had his first daughter Olivia Susan and later that year their son died of Diphtheria. In 1874, Clara their second daughter was born. At this time Twain was working on several books and plays like, “Tom Sawyer”, “The Gilded Cage”, “Huckleberry Finn”, “Ah Sin”, and “The Prince and the Pauper” (Bloom 12). In 1880 Twain had his fourth daughter Jean. While traveling the Mississippi with his family, he wrote “Life on the Mississippi” and in 1885 he finished and published “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. He then began working on one of his other famous works, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, which was published in 1889. By the end of that year he had purchased an owned his own newspaper the Paige Typesetter (Bloom 12-13).

In 1891 Twain and his family moved to Europe. In 1894 he declared bankruptcy but soon after published another literary work, “Pudd’nhead Wilson”. In 1896 Twain’s daughter Susie died of meningitis. Not too long after, Twain’s wife struggled and died from a heart disease in 1904. In the few years following Mark Twain was awarded many honors, but his most prestigious award was the Doctorate of Literature from Oxford in 1907. After receiving this award and with only one year left to live, Twain’s daughter Clara married in 1909, a few months later his daughter Jean died of epilepsy, and the finally on April 21, 1910 Samuel Langhorne Clemens died of angina pectoris in Redding, Connecticut (Bloom 13).

Mark Twain used many of the events in his own life to create a vivid picture for the readers of his literary works. When Twain published “Tom Sawyer” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, people that read these stories found them offensive. Not only were they unlike any other forms of literature they had read, they were insulting. They were so offensive because Twain used the dialect and language that he grew up with on the Mississippi. The settings of the stories were based on where Twain had been and traveled and the characters reflected himself and the people that he grew up with.

In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country”, Twain listened to the boring story of Simon Wheeler, an old friend of Leonidas