Twain, Mark ( 1835-1910)

Twain, Mark. Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens ( 1835-1910)

American humorist, journalist, and author, best known for his humorous stories of American frontier life in the 19th century, written at first under the influence of Bret Harte, with whom he was for a time associated. His Works include The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass ( 1856); The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ( 1865), his first work to attract attention, reissued in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And Other Sketches ( 1867); The Innocents Abroad ( 1869); Roughing It ( 1872); The Gilded Ace ( 1873), a novel written with Charles Dudley Warner; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (see Tom Sawyer; 1876), with its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ( 1884) the most famous of Twain's books; A Tramp Abroad ( 1880), an account of European travel; Life on the Mississippi ( 1883); The Prince and the Pauper ( 1882); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ( 1889); The American Claimant ( 1890); Pudd'nhead Wilson ( 1894); Tom Sawyer Abroad ( 1894) and Tom Sawyer Detective ( 1896), late sequels to the earlier Sawyer books; Personal Recollections of joan of Arc ( 1896); Following the Equator ( 1897), an account of a lecture tour of the world; The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg ( 1890); What Is Man? ( 1906); Christian Science ( 1907); Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven ( 1909); The Mysterious Stranger ( 1916); Mark Twain's Letters ( 1917); Mark Twain's Autobiography ( 1924). Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are considered his best work, marked, as are his most representative humorous sketches, by vigor, high-spirited exaggeration, and native colloquial idiom.

Clemens was born in Missouri and in his early youth held a number of odd jobs, working as a printer and as apprentice to a pilot on a steamboat on the Mississippi River. His pseudonym had its origin in this latter job, "mark twain," meaning "two fathoms deep," being a phrase used in taking soundings on the river boats. At the time of the Civil War he went to Nevada and California, where he met Artemus Ward and Harte, worked on frontier newspapers, and first attracted attention by his writing. He soon became extremely popular, and was also praised by serious critics of the day. After 1894, when he suffered a financial failure, his work began to show a pessimistic, misanthropic quality. Some critics, notably Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, have attributed this to the frustration of Twain's genuine creative talents by the conservative, Puritanical influence of his wife, Olivia Langdon, and her friends. The author himself directed that some of his works be published only after his death, feeling that they were too pessimistic for the public of his own lifetime.