Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)
Context
Clemens’s father was a prosperous middle-class Virginian who died when his son was only twelve. A severe, humorless man, incapable of showing affection and with a rigorous puritan conscience, his death gave young Samuel a shock which was to stay with him for life. Samuel had been born premature and was always in poor health. The family moved to Hannibal, on the Mississippi, when he was only four. The town provided him with all the characters and places we would later read about in his books. The young Clemens began his life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number of household slaves.
When his father died, Samuel was apprenticed to the job of printer. Having finished his apprenticeship, Clemens began to set type for his brother Orion's newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. He wrote humorous sketches based on current journalistic models. His first The Dandy Frightening the Squatter was published in the Carpet Bay at Boston. At the age of 18 he left home and went to the North-East where he wrote more sketches. Hannibal proved too small to hold Clemens, though; the young man soon became a sort of itinerant printer, finding work in numerous American cities, including New York and Philadelphia. While still in his early twenties, Clemens gave up his printing career in order to work on the Mississippi riverboats, and eventually became a riverboat pilot. Clemens picked up a great deal from his life on the river, most particularly the pen name Mark Twain, which was a cry used on steamboats to indicate a river depth of two fathoms. Life on the river also gave Twain material for several of his books, including the raft scenes of Huck Finn and all of the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi.
In 1861, the Civil War exploded across America, shutting down the Mississippi for travel or shipping. Twain joined a Confederate cavalry division. He joined an irregular command called the ‘Marion Rangers’. He described his experience in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. Clemens, however, was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted en masse, he did too, and made his way west with his brother, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling into his true calling, journalism.
In 1863 he began signing articles with the name Mark Twain. Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, Twain's articles, stories, memoirs, and novels, characterized by an immense and witty humor and a deft ear for language and dialect, garnered him an almost inconceivable celebrity.
Then he went to the West repudiating the historical past, not his personal past. In any case, the story of the past became his chief subject. He was capable of mordant realism and knew the truth about the steamboats (floating brothels and gambling cells). After meeting Artemus Ward, an extremely popular humorist, he improved his style and, as a result, published Those Blasted Children (1864) in the Mercury in New York. He became very famous and began to give lectures, learning not only to write the tell but how to tell it. He was an actor, and knew, after his days as a reporter, how to tie his articles together and how to give them a distinct flavor and personality. Tired of living in the west he travel to Europe and the Holy Land in 1866, the same year he published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country. After the voyage he had a liaison with Elisha Bliss, who encouraged him to publish his letters in book form. The Innocents Abroad (1869) was a great success, a frontier tale, made up from oral anecdote, casual and apparently improvised speech, full of turns and booby traps. A burlesque travel book.
In 1870 he married Olivia Langdons, a woman of substance of the new American middle class. They settled in Buffalo but soon problems mounted up. His wife gave birth to a sickly baby who died, and she was ill a lot of the time. Samuel became depressed, hated the corruption of democracy, the social scramble and the greed and became obsessed with his boyhood in Hannibal. In 1871 they moved to Hartford, Connecticut and Twain settled down to life as a professional writer. He published Roughing it, and The Gilded Age. In 1874 Old Times on the Mississippi was published on the Atlantic Monthly. These pieces and Life on the Mississippi (1883) were a kind of preparation for Huckleberry Finn.
In 1875 he finished what he had called ‘simply a hymn put into prose to give it a wordily air’, Tom Sawyer. The cult of childhood and his own role affirming the national experience by having witnessed the changes that came with the war became Twain’s subject. In 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published to wild national acclaim, cementing Twain's position as a behemoth in American literary circles. As the nation prospered economically in the post-Civil War period—an era that came to be known as the Gilded Age, an epithet that Twain coined. His books were sold door-to-door and he became wealthy enough to build a large house in Hartford, Connecticut.
That same year he began Huckleberry Finn, with the subtitle ‘Tom Sawyer’s Comrade, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier book. It took him seven years to finish it. Reviewers found the book irreverent and vicious, and there was a vast body of criticism. The controversy it aroused helped to ensure its success as Twain expected. This new novel took on a much more serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on the institution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set the work aside, perhaps because its darker tone did not fit the optimistic tone of the time. In the early 1880s, the hopefulness of the post-Civil War years began to fade. Reconstruction, the political program designed to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union as non-slave states, began to fail. The South became embittered by the harsh measures imposed by the victorious North. Concerned about maintaining power in their own regions, Southern states and individuals began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women that the war had freed.
Meanwhile, Clemens's personal life began to collapse. His wife had long been sickly, and the couple lost their first son after just nineteen months. Clemens also made some bad financial decisions. What began in 1880 as a modest investment in a typesetting system spiraled out of control, and in 1891 Clemens found himself mired in debilitating debt. As his personal fortune dwindled, he continued to devote himself to writing. Drawing from his personal plight and the prevalent national troubles of the day, he finished a draft of Huck Finn in 1883, and by 1884 had it ready for publication. Once again, the book met with great public and critical acclaim.
Over the next ten years, Clemens continued to write. Twain published The Prince and the Pauper (1881) a children’s book laid in Tudor England. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court criticizes the cult of medievalism, which had a strongly marked class element because it was cultivated by people of aristocratic background or pretensions and uses this setting to give an ironical and satirical pessimistic view of the social and personal contexts of the moment. The main characters come to desperate collision with reality . The story also tells about the tension between an agrarian and industrial world. The despair reflected in the story appeared later in Twain’s life in the form of bankruptcy.
Twain had invested a lot of money on a new typewriting machine which was not successful. He had to close his house at Hartford to economize and moved to Europe with his family undertaking a worldwide reading tour in order to pay back what he owed. Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) In 1896 his daughter in England died of meningitis before he could reach her and the following year his wife and youngest daughter became chronic invalids. By 1898 he was solvent again and return to America a hero. He embodied the American dream. People loved him, universities honored him, but his wife died and he took refuge in a massive autobiography .The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899) The Mysterious Stranger (1910, posthumous). Clemens's writing from this period until the end of his life reflects a depression and a sort of righteous rage at the injustices of the world. Though he felt himself increasingly alienated from society, Twain, was enjoying his greatest literary reputation, and continued to be in demand as a public speaker until his death.His only living daughter died of an epileptic seizure and left him depressed and without hope in the nature or fate of man. He died the following year, always defending the American character , not submitting to European fashion.
Works:
Novels: The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The American Claimant, Tom Sawyer Abroad, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Tom Sawyer Detective, The Mysterious Stranger.
Tales and Sketches: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark Twain’s Sketches: New and Old, The Stolen White Elephant and Other Stories, The $1,000,000 Bank-note and Other New Stories, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches, A Double Barrelled Detective Story, The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories.
Travel Sketches: The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Following Equator. Reminiscences: Roughing it, Life on the Mississippi. Autobiography: Mark Twain’s Autobiography Philosophical Dialogue: What is Man?
Other Works: Mark Twain’s Burlesque Autobiography, How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, Extracts from Adam’s Diary, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, Eve’s Diary, Christian Science, Is Shakespeare Dead?, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.
Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn is a tale told objectively but through the eyes of a child traveling on a raft. Both Huck and Jim are escaping from the forms imposed by society. The river provides not only a principle of structural continuity but also a principle of thematic continuity. The setting, the town of Hannibal, St Petersburg, Missouri, one of the southern slave states. Huck is the carrier of the meaning of the novel as Twain needed a hero sensitive enough to ask the right questions and demand the right answers, a 13-year-old. Twain did not want to use the third person. He wanted a language based on colloquial usage, carrying the local flavor, flexible, natural, fusing form with function, rejecting ‘British English’ in favor of the rich dialects of the American South. However, Dickens’s influence is decisive. Against Huck’s innocent enthusiasm at setting off, Twain poses a world where corruption and exploitation are rife. Twain explores the dilemma of the individual caught between his own desire for freedom and the demands of society. Huck revels. Tom Sawyer finally accepts society. This is the critical difference. Jim, Mrs Watson fugitive slave joins Huck in search of literal freedom. The boat, isolated in the middle of the river, symbolizes the detachment from a hostile society. The fight of Romanticism versus Rationalism. Huck is left to his own conscience, to help Jim, who is now his friend, or to bring him to the authorities. The result is a narrative apparently artless and plain, but with an ironic cutting edge.
Recent criticism has recognized the value of the book. Hemingway wrote: ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain call Huck Finn. It is the best we’ve had. All American writing comes from that’. Eliot said: ‘Huck Finn is one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other discoveries which man has made about himself’.
Through the twentieth century, Huck Finn has become famous not just as the crown jewel in the work of one of America's preeminent writers, but also as a subject of intense controversy. The book has been banned by sensitive Southerners because of its steadfastly critical take on the South and the hypocrisies of slavery; it has been banned by those who have dismissed it as vulgar or racist because it uses the word "nigger," a term whose connotations obscure the book's deeper themes (which are certainly antislavery). That the historical context in which Clemens wrote made his use of the word insignificant and, indeed, part of the realism he wanted to create, offers little solace to many modern readers. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then, emerges not just as a novel that explores the racial and moral world of its time, but also, through the controversies that continue to surround it, as an artifact of those same moral and racial tensions as they have evolved into the present day.
Key Facts
Full Title - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author - Mark Twain (pseudonym for Samuel Clemens)
Type of Work - Novel
Genre - Picaresque (episodic, colorful, often has quest or journey structure); satire of popular adventure and romance novels; bildungsroman (novel of education or moral development)
Language - English (frequently makes use of Southern and black dialects)
Time and place written - Begun in 1876 as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Twain set it aside and returned to it several times, finally finishing it in 1883; written mostly in Hartford, Connecticut, and Elmira, New York