Mark Twain was born Samuel
Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town
on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two
most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
Clemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family
that owned a number of household slaves. The death of Clemens’s
father in 1847, however, left the family
in hardship. Clemens left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851,
having finished his apprenticeship, began to set type for his brother
Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. But Hannibal
proved too small to hold Clemens, who soon became a sort of itinerant
printer and found work in a number of American cities, including
New York and Philadelphia.
While still in his early twenties, Clemens
gave up his printing career in order to work on riverboats on the
Mississippi. Clemens eventually became a riverboat pilot, and his
life on the river influenced him a great deal. Perhaps most important,
the riverboat life provided him with the pen name Mark Twain, derived
from the riverboat leadsmen’s signal—“By the mark, twain”—that the water
was deep enough for safe passage. Life on the river also gave Twain
material for several of his books, including the raft scenes of Huckleberry
Finn and the material for his autobiographical Life
on the Mississippi (1883).
Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861,
when the Civil War exploded across America and shut down the Mississippi for
travel and shipping. Although Clemens joined a Confederate cavalry
division, he was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted
en masse, he did too. He then made his way west with his brother
Orion, working first as a silver miner in Nevada and then stumbling
into his true calling, journalism. In 1863,
Clemens began to sign articles with the name Mark Twain.
Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s,
Twain’s articles, stories, memoirs, and novels, characterized by
an irrepressible wit and a deft ear for language and dialect, garnered
him immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869) was
an instant bestseller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) received
even greater national acclaim and cemented Twain’s position as a
giant 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—so too did Twain. His books were
sold door-to-door, and he became wealthy enough to build a large
house in Hartford, Connecticut, for himself and his wife, Olivia,
whom he had married in 1870.
Twain began work on Huckleberry Finn, a
sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to capitalize
on the popularity of the earlier novel. This new novel took on a
more serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on
the institution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set Huckleberry
Finn aside, perhaps because its darker tone did not fit
the optimistic sentiments of the Gilded Age. In the early 1880s,
however, 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 a slavery-free region, began to
fail. The harsh measures the victorious North imposed only embittered
the South. Concerned about maintaining power, many Southern politicians
began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women whom
the war had freed.
Meanwhile, Twain’s personal life began to collapse. His
wife had long been sickly, and the couple lost their first son after
just nineteen months. Twain also made a number of poor investments
and financial decisions and, in 1891, 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 Huckleberry Finn in 1883,
and by 1884 had it ready for publication.
The novel met with great public and critical acclaim.
Twain continued to write over the next ten years. He published two
more popular novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894),
but went into a considerable decline afterward, never again publishing
work that matched the high standard he had set with Huckleberry
Finn. Personal tragedy also continued to hound Twain: his
finances remained troublesome, and within the course of a few years,
his wife and two of his daughters passed away. Twain’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. Despite
his personal troubles, however, Twain continued to enjoy immense
esteem and fame and continued to be in demand as a public speaker
until his death in 1910.
The story of Huckleberry Finn, however,
does not end with the death of its author. Through the twentieth
century, the novel has become famous not merely as the crown jewel
in the work of one of America’s preeminent writers, but also as
a subject of intense controversy. The novel occasionally has been
banned in Southern states because of its steadfastly critical take
on the South and the hypocrisies of slavery. Others have dismissed Huckleberry
Finn as vulgar or racist because it uses the word nigger, a term whose connotations obscure the novel’s deeper themes—which
are unequivocally antislavery—and even prevent some from reading
and enjoying it altogether. The fact that the historical context
in which Twain wrote made his use of the word insignificant—and,
indeed, part of the realism he wanted to create—offers little solace
to some modern readers. Ultimately, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn has proved significant not only 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 to the present day.
