Mark Twain Background

1. Mark Twain Background English 5C October 19, 2009

2. I. Intro/Early Years • Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens 2. in 1835. 3. He spent his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri where his father opened a general store. 4. He encountered dead bodies when the corpse of a murder victim was left in his father’s justice of the peace office, when he witnessed the shooting of one neighbor by another and when he and his friends discovered the corpse of a fugitive slave.

3. I. Early Years Continued 5. Twain’s first job was as an apprentice printer at a newspaper after his father died in 1847. 6. His inspiration for Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly was his own mother since they became close after his father died. 7. Twain’s writing career began when he traveled in 1853 to New York to see the first world’s fair and he wrote short sketches that were published in the Saturday Evening Post and the Western Union.

4. II. Life on the Mississippi 8. Twain’s wild dream for himself was to travel to the Amazon and make his fortune hunting coca. 9. He got his cynical notion of morality from a Scotsman named Macfarlane he met in Cincinnati. 10. Twain lived and worked for 4 years as an apprentice and pilot on a steamboat on the Mississippi. 11. This experience of meeting a wide variety of interesting rivermen provided him with many sources of insight and inspiration for his writing.

5. II. Response to the Civil War 12. Twain initially supported the Confederacy, but his allegiance lasted only two weeks. 13. He got his pen name from the steamboat term meaning a depth of two fathoms - a water level that is safe for steamboats.

6. III. Marriage and Family 14. As well as writing, Twain earned money lecturing from 1866-1874 on politics, travel and literature. 15. During this time, Twain married Olivia (Livy) Langdon and 16. they moved to Buffalo in 1870. 17. His children who lived to adulthood were three daughters Susy, Clara and Jean and 18. He did most of his writing on Quarry Farm, his sister-in-law’s home in Elmira, New York where his family spent its summers.

7. IV. Twain’s Writing 19. Twain’s first literary success was The Innocents Abroad (1869) based on his trip to the Holy Land. 20. His first solo novel was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) based on many autobiographical events from his childhood in Hannibal. 21. The public’s initial response, however, was lukewarm.

8. IV. Twain’s Writing Continued 22. He then wrote a collection of memoirs, letters, history and statistics called Life on the Mississippi (1883) and 23. two novels The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and Adventures of Huck Finn (1884). 24. Twain was most remembered as a lecturer and statesman after he stopped writing in 1896.

9. V. Twain’s Allegiances • Missouri, where Twain was raised, was a border state although it was claimed by the Union before secession could occur. • During the Civil War, the Mississippi River was an important lifeline and the North tried to gain control of the river to divide the Confederacy. 27. Twain joined the Marion Rangers, a pseudo-Confederate unit formed by the boys of Hannibal but 28. the unit had no formal training and disbanded within a few weeks.

10. V. Twain’s Allegiances Continued 29. During this time period, most of Twain’s fiction was set in pre-Civil War South, which some claimed was evidence of Twain’s racism. 30. However, evidence that Twain was NOT a racist is the fact that he made tuition payments for many African Americans to attend Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, paid for the apprenticeship of black artist Charles Ethan Porter and financed the Yale Law School education of Warner Thorton McGuinn, one of the school’s first black graduates.

11. VI. Twain’s Influence and Final Years 31. Twain’s career progressed from him being a humorist, to satirist to outspoken social critic. 32. In 1893 he faced bankruptcy from unwise business decisions and 33. he stopped writing in 1904 when his wife died. 34. Twain suffered from angina pectoris in the last year of his life, causing chest pain and lack of oxygen, probably caused by smoking. 35. Both when he was born in 1835 and when he died in 1910 were years that Halley’s Comet was passing.