Mark Twain's wit is scattered throughout our public consciousness. The characters and tales created by Twain loom large in our American tradition, as do his famous quotations—from “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well” to "The report of my death was an exaggeration." Across pop culture, Twain's work still resonates—Bugs Bunny was accidentally transported to King Arthur's court and mistaken for a "dwagon" by Sir Elmer of Fudde; Bart and Nelson became Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in a tall tale on The Simpsons; and adaptations of The Prince and the Pauper, in which a prince and pauper who look alike temporarily switch places, have been done by entertainment giants ranging from Barbie to Bollywood.
Twain is perhaps best known for American classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), in which a group of mischievous young boys have adventures alongside the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), in which a young boy runs away from home alongside an enslaved man named Jim. Twain's books used witty satire and an adventurous tone to both represent and criticize American life, and he's considered quintessential to the birth of a distinctly American canon of literature.
Mark Twain’s early life
Mark Twain—real name Samuel Clemens—was born on November 30, 1835, in the ironically named Florida, Missouri. Clemens was a sickly child who liked to test the limits of his mom's patience. (Later, when he asked her whether she worried about him often as a child, she said yes. "Afraid I wouldn't live?" he asked. "No," she said, "afraid you would.") His father was more serious, a businessman who was often in debt but always promised his children that someday they'd all be rich. For Samuel's childhood, the Clemens family lived in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River that would expose him to the violent realities of class and slavery, and inspire many of his later stories.
Clemens's father died when he was just 11 years old, and he got to work not long after. Clemens worked as a type-setter, riverboat pilot, and reporter, and lived everywhere from Philadelphia to Iowa to California, getting a broad look at life in the United States in the process. He would avoid the Civil War for the most part, briefly joining a Confederate unit before leaving to live with his older brother in Nevada territory. By the 1870s, he'd realized that writing humor was his calling, and he started gaining traction with the sketches and stories that would eventually bloom into his famous novels.
Twain’s writing career and later life
Clemens tried many different pen names over the years. W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, for example, or my personal favorite, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. But, ironically, the one that stuck was actually stolen. Riverboat pilot Isaiah Sellers had been using Mark Twain as a pen name for years. Clemens heard (mistakenly) that Sellers was dead in 1863, and just started using it.
It was as Mark Twain that he would publish all of his most iconic works. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, would make him a household name, and has never gone out of print. It centered young teens in a town much like the one Twain grew up in along the Mississippi. One of the characters in that book, Huck, had his own story to tell; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, and is considered an American classic. Other major works would include autobiographical travelogues, like Roughing It (1872) or A Tramp Abroad (1880), and famous, much-adapted stories satirizing social hypocrisy, such as The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Unfortunately, despite so much success, the end of his life was difficult. He struggled with debt, and lost his wife and three of his four children. He spent much of his time lecturing across Europe and writing more serious works, including a travelogue and essays that satirized and critiqued everything from Belgian imperialism to lynching in the United States.
Twain was born in 1835, the same year Halley's Comet passed by Earth. He later wrote that he expected to go out with it, too, joking that God said: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together." Twain was right. In 1910, Halley's Comet returned, and Mark Twain died.
Mark Twain’s legacy
"All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway said in 1935, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Twain brought the American vernacular to the forefront in his books. His witty approach to literature, challenging stereotypes and fighting traditional structures of power, his characters and his archetypes, were and are distinctly American. In 2015, The New York Times wrote: "Mark Twain wittily distrusted everything bogus, inflated, predictable or empty." His use of everyday American speech, the characters he created, and the stories he told allied him with the common American man, with the layperson. This attitude would inspire many American writers and stories to come, and cemented his work as a key, formative chapter in the legacy of American literature.
