Literary articles - Mark Twain 2024

Genesis: The Making of “Mark Twain” as a Literary Persona

Before Mark Twain, there was Sam Clemens. As a poor boy from a large Missouri family, young Sam's upbringing was a critical source of inspiration for some of his most renowned literature. The town of Hannibal, where the Clemens' lived for most of Sam's life, is today a living memorial to the man and his work. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are both set in a fictitious town similar to Sam's, and several landmarks in these novels—the caves that Tom and Becky explore, the island that Huck and Jim inhabit—exist in Hannibal. The use of childhood memories in these particular works acknowledges Clemens's Southern heritage —not so much to reveal the specific details of his birthplace, but the mannerisms, dialects, and values of the South that laid the foundation for so much of his persona as Mark Twain. Sam Clemens selected this pseudonym only after he had left the South, piloted a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River, and finally moved West; it was not known widely until he had moved to the Northeast. Twain's celebrity was indeed steadily paced, but the origins of the name itself bespeak an unwavering fondness for the South, and, despite the author's general wanderlust, a desire to hearken back to the youthful innocence of his Hannibal boyhood.

Clemens's life leading up to his literary success is imperative to an understanding of how his literature influenced the culture around him. An ostensible outsider to the world of the literary artists of his day, the rowdy Southerner's upbringing was not one typical of a literary mastermind. With little formal education and a wandering spirit, Sam saw much more of America than his peers and found himself cynically aware of its particular pitfalls and hypocritical beliefs. He escaped the genteel tradition until he adopted it, and only then came to despise it. A look at the life of the man before he became the author bespeaks a legacy of confronting stereotypes and general discontent—indications of his innate lack of subscription to society's expectations.

The Early Years

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. The sixth of seven children, Clemens experienced death at a young age as only three of his siblings survived to adulthood. Born to a devout Calvinist mother, Clemens was instilled with deep sense of mortal guilt at an early age, exacerbated by the death of two of his younger siblings when he was a boy and young man. Sickly and small, young Sam was prone to sleep walking. He was born prematurely and was “hounded” by anxiety and “seismic shifts of mood” (Powers, 9). Clemens's mother, Jane, had little hope for young Sam, assuming the boy hadn't much to aspire to at all. Only four of the Clemens children survived childhood: the eldest, Orion, who played a large role in Sam's wanderlust, Pamela, who remained in Missouri, Sam, and the youngest, Henry.

In 1839, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam would spend the duration of his childhood into early adolescence. While fathers are mysteriously absent from most of his literature, Sam Clemens's own father, John Marshall Clemens, was in the home and was always looking to get rich quick. A spirited entrepreneur without any real talent for success, John Marshall was a chronic failure and an embarrassment to his Virginia gentleman roots. The family lived in various states of transition and poverty for most of Sam's childhood.

Despite their financial unrest, the Clemens family did own slaves—the exact number has been disputed by personal account and public record. Sam recalls an experience with young boy slave who used to constantly sing and whistle a song taught to him by his mother. Young Sam complained, and his mother reprimanded him, reminding her son that the young boy had been separated from his mother and would probably never see her again. Sam was sobered by this notion, and as the Civil War loomed, the wheels had already been set in motion for Sam's lifelong pushback against racial prejudice. In addition to fostering her son's progressive mind, Jane Clemens is also famous for instilling in Sam an altruistic love of animals, especially cats. Sam's boyhood would be cherished better in retrospect. In his autobiography, Mark Twain writes, “when I was a boy everybody was poor but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it” (MTA, 33). He describes the social norms of Hannibal with a surety that comes only with having been raised within them, and does so with reverence, calling the system “a little democracy which was full of liberty, equality, and the Fourth of July, and sincerely so, too” (Paine, 120). Twain's life would be bookended by both structure and patriotism, but he would feel differently about the circumstances on the other side. The emphasis that Mark Twain placed on this particular point in one's childhood—the in-between of formal education and infancy—lends itself to an understanding of the man's high regard for innocence as a purveyor of both idealism and insight.

Clemens At Work

Like Tom Sawyer, Sam Clemens had no patience for school, preferring instead to spend his time with the son of the town drunk. In 1847, his father died. Sam was able to formally quit school then (as opposed to the occasional playing of hooky), at the age of twelve. This kicked off a period of “fitful job hopping” that “went on for about a year and half" as young Sam attempted to find a niche or trade that was both stimulating and lucrative. He worked at a grocery store, an apothecary shop, a blacksmith's shop, and as a paper boy. His mother, Jane, helped him find work a bookstore, of which Clemens has recalled, “the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort” (Powers, 45). He went on to work “part-time as a printer's devil at the Hannibal Gazette,” learning to typeset text on a printing press similar to the one used by Benjamin Franklin centuries earlier. Powers recounts that Sam “claimed that he even spent a week studying the law, but gave it up ‘because it was so prosy and tiresome'” (Powers, 46). Finally, in 1848, the Hannibal Gazette was purchased by a twenty-four year old named Joseph P. Ament. Unpaid, young Sam was reimbursed in hand-me-down clothes and the occasional hot meal. At the Hannibal Courier, Clemens was introduced to a handful of “eccentric misfits,” which Powers asserts was typical for the newspaper business, “whether in a rural outpost or a great city” (Powers, 48). These men were, to various extents, the village that helped raise the brawling, amoral Clemens who made his way to the land of outlaws in the Wild Wild West.

But before Clemens embarked upon his own version of manifest destiny, he was lounging in the shade of his brother's shadow. In 1851, Orion Clemens opened his own publishing house. As Powers writes, he “needed all the help he could get” (Powers, 53), and fifteen-year-old Sam was much better suited for success than Orion had ever been. Like his late father, Orion was prone to “los[ing] his enthusiasm” for projects, growing depressed in the middle of them, and calling in a family favor. John Marshall had done this many times over with his brother-in-law, and eventually they became estranged. While Sam never truly abandoned his brother, he did satirize him mercilessly—blatantly as “Orion” in Roughing It; more discreetly as one of the “Extraordinary Twins,” Angelo Capello, in Pudd'n Head Wilson.

This satire was compounded by the fact that Sam “pitied, bankrolled, and safeguarded his sibling” (Powers, 53). Orion founded the Hannibal Journal in 1851, and Sam used the opportunity to begin publishing short, satiric sketches and local news items. Despite his mild resentment of Orion's shortcomings, Sam was fiercely protective of his brother, going so far as to engage in a battle with the publisher of a rival paper who “made the grace, if unsuspecting, mistake of riddling Orion Clemens in print” (Powers, 52). At sixteen, young Clemens had a clear talent for invective wit without a shred of refinement, often scandalizing his older, serious brother. Such a relationship—the tawdry tenderfoot and bumbling gentleman—served as important fodder not only for Sam's literary career, but also for the persona of Mark Twain in general.

Growing up in Hannibal, Sam's “universe was constricted to the little river town that had held him since the age of four” (Powers, 58), but after a few arduous years in the type-setting and publishing business, Sam was growing weary of knowing the river life only from the banks. After a few final sketches and stories—a “final boyhood display of his developing gift of ‘voice'—of tonal and syntactic mimicry” (Powers, 60)—published in Orion's Journal, Sam alerted his mother of his plans to leave. A headline appeared on May 25, 1853: “Wanted! An Apprentice to the Printing Business. Apply soon” (Powers, 60). With that, Sam travelled South to St. Louis, vaguely planning to find a job in publishing while staying with Pamela and her husband. By mid-June of that year, Sam had boarded a steamboat and set out down the Mississippi. He writes in his autobiography of the memory, “I disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis,” (Twain, MTA, 94). Sam Clemens returned to Hannibal “just six more times in his life”

(Powers, 61). He inhabited Hannibal again only through literature, immortalizing in Tom and Huck the woes and pleasures of Southern boyhood.

Pilot's Life

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. […] These ambitions faded out, each in turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. (Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 32)

Sam's initial stint in St. Louis is not well-documented, but it is notable that this was his first taste of city life. There, his type-setting skills were considered lethargic and imprecise— perhaps more telling of the kind of boss in Orion than the worker in Sam. Still, his skills couldn't keep him a steady income, and young Sam set off on his own, traveling North by steamboat and train. He worked on and off for small presses and bustling publishing houses. As an itinerant publisher, Sam travelled to Illinois, Washington, D.C., Iowa, Ohio, New York and Philadelphia, chronicling his journey as a passenger on a riverboat into notebooks—something which proved to be integral to his future literary endeavors.

Into these, over four decades, he poured “found data”: wisps of experience and anecdotes; bursts of indignation, opinion, regret; newly minted aphorisms, maps real and imagined; German vocabulary; timetables and laundry lists; notes on the works of Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold; the listing of facts of all kinds; and, as always, the stunning harvest of his intense noticing (“Sailors walk with hands somewhat spread & palms turned backward”) that made his writing burn truer and more mimetic of life-as-lived than anyone else's in American or Europe. (Powers, 69)

These notes would not reveal their true potential until much later, instead serving as practice and dormant dossier for his future career. Orion closed his Journal in 1855, and re-opened shop permanently in the hometown of his new wife, Mollie. Sam and Henry joined Orion's Ben

Franklin Book and Job Office: Cards, Circulars, Bill Heads, Bills Lading, Posters, and Colored Work, Printed, in the same year. All three brothers failed to bring in adequate money, especially Orion, whose wife gave birth in September. Sam, annoyed at his slim paychecks, unable to write, again set out by boat to various port cities and took to meandering around the countryside. Far away from Bleeding Kansas and the political hotbeds of the moment, he found himself in Cincinnati and Keokuk with little to do and even less to write about.

Life grew lackluster for twenty-one-year-old Clemens. He had dreams of venturing abroad, to Europe or Brazil. On February 16, 1857, he boarded a steamboat, the Paul Jones, “piloted by one Horace Bixby” (Powers, 75), whose persona is known most completely from his description in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. In that account, Twain writes that it wasn't until the boat entered port in New Orleans that he even considered this to be his opportunity to make a boyhood fantasy a reality. Broke and almost arrested, Sam Clemens had the epiphany. It took three days to convince Bixby that he should take the young man on as his apprentice.

In Life on the Mississippi, Twain admits there was a steep learning curve when it came to the art of steamboat piloting. But to be the pupil of Horace Bixby meant having the wherewithal to study under an unrelenting master. Imposing, foul-mouthed, and fond of red whiskey, Horace Bixby was the archetypal pilot. “When I say I'll learn a man the river, I mean it,” Bixby tells Twain gravely, “And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him” (Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 53).

And indeed, Sam Clemens, “in time,” came to know the river as “a wonderful book […] which told its mind to [him] without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it it uttered them with a voice” (Twain, Life, 57). His notebooks, still regularly updated, were suddenly filled with rudimentary maps of the Mississippi. When he wasn't piloting, Sam, an autodidact, read voraciously, learned French, smoked cigars, and outfitted his notebooks with coded river secrets. His knowledge of the Mississippi was so precise that he writes in Life on the Mississippi, quite despondently, about the pitfalls of growing so incredibly apt at one's trade.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steam boating was new to me. (Twain, Life, 58)

In the paragraphs that follow, Twain—albeit uncharacteristically—weaves a gorgeous picture of the river at sunset, gilded and enchanting both in imagery and pure prose. With its ever-changing sights and the grace of its current, its colors and points of interest in some particular region, the river is described so majestically to the reader, one would think they were reading Thoreau. Alas, Twain decries, “a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them” (Twain, Life, 59). Once picturesque and innocent, he bemoans his inability to see the beauty in favor of reading the river's warnings. “All the value any feature of it had for me now,” writes Twain, “was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat” (Twain, Life, 59). Twain conjures this river imagery with surprising ease, echoing the likes of Whitman and Thoreau, possibly as an homage, or perhaps to show his reader how easy it is to describe what is beautiful. Albeit a travel writer, Twain never fixated on landscape as carefully as he focused on humans and their culture.

Clemens was a quality pilot with an undeniable mastery of the river, and despite his loss of awe at the expense of his trade, the river was his career. At this time in the late 1850s, his Mississippi river life was considered the cards the world had dealt for Sam Clemens. He was pulling in a sizable salary, and had even pulled strings for his brother, Henry, so the nineteen-year-old could join him on the Pennsylvania. But Sam was on the verge of a far different course that even he could not have interpreted from the horizon.

In New Orleans, he met a young girl named Laura Wright, seven years his junior, who was traveling for the first time away from home with her uncle, a pilot on a freight steamer. Twenty-one-year-old Clemens was smitten with Laura. He courted her for three full days, reportedly besotted. They were forced to split ways. Her uncle's boat was shipping out; Sam was devastated. Clemens attempted to “to keep the romance alive” through letters, but the adolescent Ms. Wright let it be known that her “interest” had “waned” (Powers, 83). This caused Further emotional devastation for Clemens; he consulted psychics and the girl's mother. Her rejection was to be the first of two major tragedies that he experienced in the summer of 1858.

Despite his physical proximity to Orion, Henry Clemens aspired to be like Sam. Eager to take his younger, much more capable brother under his wing, Sam helped nineteen-year-old Henry get an apprenticeship on the Pennsylvania in February of 1858. They worked several trips together, growing close as brothers and friends, Henry worked as a mud-clerk and Sam “on loan from Bixby” as a cub-pilot (Powers, 84). In May of 1858, Sam dreamt that “he had seen Henry a corpse” (Powers, 84). Shaken, their family thought little of his premonition. In June of that year, the Pennsylvania once again headed downriver to New Orleans. Issues of steamboat politics arose among pilots and captains, and, in order to assuage the tension, Sam stayed an extra two days in port before departing back on the Lacey on June 11. Powers recounts the fateful day:

Two days later, Sam Clemens heard a chilling shout from the levee: “The ‘Pennsylvania' is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred fifty lives lost!' Mark Twain is silent on his reaction to this ghastly news. Whatever shock he felt was temporarily allayed at Napolean, Arkansas: an ‘extra' edition of a Memphis newspaper, rushed downriver, listed the fates of some of the passengers. Henry's name appeared among the uninjured. Then the news turned irreparably bad. A later edition reported that Henry Clemens was “hurt beyond help.” (Powers, 86)

Sam was devastated. In mourning for virtually the rest of his life, Mark Twain “relived and rewrote Henry's death” in several of his novels and essays; his brother died differently in each recapitulation. The guilt that had plagued Sam since childhood became all-consuming; he couldn't shake the notion that he had led Henry right to death's door and taught him how to knock. This sense of responsibility was further exacerbated by the shame, the “excruciating luck” (Powers, 89), of Sam's own survival. He implored a God he no longer believed in “to strike his ‘wicked head' and have mercy ‘upon that unoffending boy'” (Powers, 89). A man who once considered joining the ministry found his heart hardened toward religion, now not merely skeptical, but embittered.

Clemens' entire persona changed. Once jovial and boyishly witty, he became, according to G.K. Chesterton, “‘always serious to the point of madness'” and “‘unfathomably solemn'” (Powers, 89). But the summer 1858 marked the end of the era of young Sam Clemens. With the death of a romance, a brother, and a summer came the dawn of Mark Twain.

Go West, Young Sam

After the death of Henry, Sam continued his life on the river in the years leading up to the Civil War. He wrote many letters home to his siblings and nieces, and continued writing correspondence pieces for newspapers. Following the Pennsylvania explosion, Sam's writing began to take on an air of authoritative wit. He penned decisive articles on politics and business that Powers characterizes as the “voice […] of the Insider” (Powers, 92). While this mode certainly does not characterize all of his narratorial personas, this connoisseur-critic is integral to much of Twain's fiction being narrated in the first person.

On April 9, 1859, Clemens was officially given his pilot's license. He was finally “a member of the river world's elite lodge, with its $250 monthly salary” (Powers, 94). Sam would be remembered as a solid pilot, though his record is not without a few marks against it—he grounded at least two boats, and accidentally drove a massive vessel called City of Memphis into the New Orleans levee. For the latter, Powers writes that “no serious harm was done and no blame assigned” (Powers, 95). In Roughing It, Mark Twain calls himself a “good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot” and was “by no means ashamed of [his] abilities” (Twain, Roughing It, 272). In the meantime, Orion moved to Memphis and opened a law practice, and Pamela and her husband were rising through the social ranks in St. Louis.

In November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Rumors circulated that the Chicagoan planned to abolish slavery. States began to secede from the Union. In February of 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected as President of the Confederate States of America. Sam Clemens experienced the disintegration of the Union from the river, unconcerned with the war brewing and harboring an unsteady position on slavery, which tended to change with his mood. It wasn't until May of 1861 that the fear of being involved in the war became real and palpable to Clemens. River boat pilots were sought-after on both sides, and Sam was afraid of either side attempting to sway him into joining up—the usual methods of coercion included a pistol to the head.

Missouri had a rather complex stance on their political affiliation during the Civil War. As a Southern state, it was undoubtedly sympathetic to the Confederacy, and had voted for Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election. But Missouri slaveholders knew that “as an isolated northerly catch basin for slave owners, the state would have been virtually surrounded by a hostile nation” (Powers, 97) if it didn't comply with the Union. In fact, Missouri sent twice as many soldiers to fight for the Union throughout the War. That said, Sam's allegiance as a Southerner lay with the state of Missouri; after coming into port in St. Louis, he and a few “hometown friends” travelled to Hannibal and joined the Missouri State Guard.

Powers reports that Sam joined up about two weeks before the Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861. He and his Hannibal comrades called themselves the Ralls County Rangers. Sam was elected second lieutenant, and the Hannibal boys cut their hair short with sheep shears (Powers, 98). He lasted about a week and a half before slipping off, hiding away from both Confederacy and Union at his sister's house in Memphis. Back in St. Louis, Orion—“chronically cashpoor” (Powers, 102)—was vying for a government appointment after his former mentor had climbed in the ranks. He was sworn in as the Secretary of the Nevada territory on July 11, 1861, and a week later Sam and Orion had consolidated their belongings into traveling trunks, “twenty-five pounds each” (Twain, Roughing It, 4). They were to travel two thousand miles westward to Carson City, Nevada. Back in St. Louis, the Clemens brothers left their “swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves,” but brought all six pounds of the Unabridged Dictionary (Twain, Roughing It,

4); they travelled with “no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful,” trading them—and such a life—for new adventures. Roughing It, published in 1872, would prove to be a comprehensive chronicle of this journey and its notable destinations thereafter.

Roughing It

Twenty-five year old Clemens set out West for what he assumed would be a three-month “pleasure trip;” he stayed for seven years. The Clemens brothers were heading for Carson City, Nevada, where the California Gold Rush had come and gone and flared up again, this time with the discovery of silver by Henry Comstock. Sam and Orion lived together in a shanty near the Comstock in a little thrown-together town called Virginia. While Orion was absorbed with his secretarial duties and getting acquainted with the “dark” world of “territorial politics,” Sam “bought himself some cowboy clothes—big slouch hat, flannel shirt, thick pants stuffed into leather boots,” and got to know the others in the boardinghouse. The men he met were mostly, like Orion, young pols of James W. Nye, the newly-appointed territorial governor. The Nye pols talked of getting their feet wet in the “mining bonanza,” and Sam developed a twinkle in his eye that can only be said to be hereditary (Powers, 105). “Here was a chance to get rich,” writes Powers, and indeed Sam took the plunge and began speculating.

His endeavors were mostly fruitless. Letters exchanged between Sam and Orion during this time reveal rapid alternating between Sam condemning Orion for wasting money, begging him to send more, and bragging about how much he had generated. He wrote home often, and

letters to his mother and niece suggest a burgeoning fascination with Western landscape, as well as the establishment of his comic voice. He once wrote to his mother and sister in a letter, The country […] is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris, (gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, cuyotés (pronounced ki-yo-ties,) poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. […] It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. (Clemens, Letters, 132)

These nuggets of observation would prove essential to the later-codified characteristics typically found and studied in Mark Twain's prose. In a simple list, Clemens already displays his mastery of citing incongruities among an accepted system of order—in this case, the act of living in what was then the US frontier of Western society; all the while, he makes familiar a place that his reader (here, Jane Clemens) has ostensibly never laid on eyes upon. In these letters, Mark Twain begins to poke through pages signed S.L.C.. While he depicts himself as naive and tender-footed as the narrator of Roughing It, the writer was in fact rather well-travelled, and kept tedious track of his observations.

While prospecting for silver may have been a short-term goal, it never amounted to much more than a scheme, echoing the fruitless endeavors of John Marshall, former Clemens patriarch. Later, these get-rich-quick attempts would serve as humorous fodder for several short sketches in the episodic epic Roughing It. Some of the stories in Twain's novel are too outrageous to be true, yet are recapitulated over and again by his biographers. There does exists a famous account of Sam and a friend, John D. Kinney, setting out into the Sierra Nevada for a mining expedition and accidentally setting a mountain on fire, which Twain recalls in Roughing It. Suffice it to say that Clemens was never much of a miner nor an entrepreneur—perhaps the Clemens curse—but he did find his niche in the West. He travelled to Aurora and the Humboldt mines but found little in the way of a consistent income.

In late June of 1862, he made the most successful speculation of his life: Sam Clemens decided to try out an old hobby as a career. He had been sending in short pieces to a small newspaper in Virginia City called the Territorial Enterprise. Orion pulled some strings and helped his younger brother secure a job as a staff reporter. At twenty-five dollars a week, the gig promised more money than Sam had earned in months. That autumn, after he had formally accepted the position, Clemens “hiked the 120 miles north to Virginia City” from Aurora “with a bundle of blankets on his back” (Powers, 110). When he arrived for that first day of work, Sam famously greeted the office, “Dang my buttons, if I don't believe I'm lousy” (Powers, 110). Powers remarks that Clemens indeed appeared “less like somebody who'd come to write for the paper than like somebody who'd come to rob it” (Powers, 110).

As a poor Southerner from a rural town, Clemens was much better suited for the Wild West than the bulk of Northeastern pioneers. Foul-mouthed, with a Pike County drawl that was foreign to most, he had a knack for the general news stories he was given at the beginning of his career. Though he considered it rather dreary work at first, Clemens was able to ingratiate himself to the “locals,” gathering information about freight shipments, mining statistics and courthouse rulings. Powers reports that the newspaper went to print at 2 a.m., meaning Clemens started his rounds around noon, patrolling for gossip and hearsay from post office workers, ladies around town, local politicians, and—perhaps most happily—talkative barkeeps. He was bored, and the writing came easily. However, the former teetotaler found that his best work was done over a beer with the miners or after sharing liquor with an afternoon bartender.

After almost a year at the Territorial Enterprise, Clemens' editor, Joseph T. Goodman, discovered “the fact that he could write” (Powers, 115). Goodman allowed Sam the freedom to cover stories, mostly political, in Carson City. These bored Sam, an inveterate doodler, who would draw caricatures of the politicians and rename them according to their temperament. In having “lobbied” for the “legislature beat,” Clemens crossed paths with Clement T. Rice, a rival reporter from the Virginia City Union. Rice, sensing a rookie in political procedure, jumped on Clemens early on for some fumbled detail. Clemens deemed Rice “The Unreliable,” and the feud between them began. Sam, bored with the “rote work” of reporting on “stock quotations, earnings from some of the five hundred mines on the mountain, and public meetings in the town” instead turned his column into “a spoof of the genre” (Powers, 116). This initiative migrated into a rather transformational time for Sam, who had begun to master the art of the “19th century newspaper ‘letter,'” which demanded “personal intimacy, comic flair, and sharply observed journalism” (Powers, 116). On February 3, 1863, his first letter was published, teeming with the Twainian features of exaggeration, self-deprecation, the critiquing narrator, and an “arresting first sentence” (Powers, 117). The letter was signed with a foreign signature, one never before penned by the former S.L.C: “Mark Twain.”

The origins of Clemens' pseudonym are hazy—there isn't much evidence as to the choice being decided after an arduous process or deliberation. It is true that “Mark Twain” is a riverboat term, meaning “mark two,” two fathoms, or a depth of twelve feet—“a depth readily navigable and safe” (Powers, 118). Why Clemens developed his literary alter ego is also a subject up for debate. It was certainly in fashion at the time to take a pen name, and furthermore his satire was not always well-received. Twain became the writer, and Clemens the man and the reporter.

“Mark Twain” is perhaps the most analyzed of pseudonyms, and not without reasonable cause— one rarely finds a pen name with such persuasive, every-man syllables glorified by the pleasant, “tight knock of hard consonants” (Powers, 118).

Friends in High Places

In late December of 1863, Sam met Artemus Ward in Virginia City. Ward, a humorist, was in town giving lectures to adoring audiences. Born Charles Farrar Browne, Ward was an American icon—gangly, “foppish, merry, tubercular, doomed” (Powers, 129)—who exerted an indelible influence over the future of Mark Twain. Ward was by-and-large a lecturer, who first encountered Twain after a night of drinking post-performance in Virginia City. There, in good spirits, the Missourian was no match for the seasoned performer, and Ward is reported to have bested Clemens publicly. But Ward was immediately ingratiated to the drawling, childlike Missourian; Sam was taken with Ward's modern manipulation of “theatrical devices to explode the merely amusing into the hilarious” (Powers, 132). Artemus Ward was certainly performing “cutting-edge stuff for mid-19th century America” (Powers, 132), and he saw a lot of himself in the in Twain's blossoming ruffian persona..

Where Ward was maudlin with a twist, Twain was raucous, uninhibited mockery and foolishness. And Sam certainly needed Ward—while the former was known in Nevada and California, the latter was infamous throughout the Union, and had performed in New York City several times. During their platonic Yuletide salons that December, the two engaged in rousing battles of wits, the likes of which the American public would have paid immense sums of money for in a decade. Ward recommended Twain to his editors as a man of “gorgeous talents” (Powers, 133), and Twain recommended Ward to his mother as a houseguest.1

Allegedly, after a two-day stint in Virginia City, Ward joined Twain and Dan DeQuille2 on a rooftop tour of the mining town. This naturally including copious amounts of liquor (of which Jane Clemens would reproach every last drop) and, according to Powers, found the trio of humorous drunkards on the wrong end of the sheriff's pistol. He threatened them with rock-salt bullets if they didn't quiet down, and the men dispersed. Ward departed days later, with a new comrade in his sights. In a letter dated January 1st, Ward wrote to Sam, addressing him as “My Dearest Love,” and proceeding to “[rehash] some of the wild times in Virginia City” (Powers, 134). But Ward was headed East, and, though he invited Mark Twain along with him, Sam remained in the West. As Sam writes to his mother,

Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself—leave sage-brush obscurity, & journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. I preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly & brilliantly, & so I concluded to remain here. (Twain, Letters) But Sam would not remain in the West—and certainly not Nevada—for much longer. As with reading the river, Sam Clemens entered the world of journalism as a gifted novice. After two years gone and enemies made, he left the Enterprise as a gilded reporter and locally famous humorist. He now had intimate knowledge of both the culture and politics of the Wild West, and it was time for him to move onward. His time in San Francisco would enable him to enjoy the fruits of this literary maturity.

Twain in Bohemia

There are a few rumored tales regarding Clemens' fateful move from Virginia City, Nevada to San Francisco, California in 1864. Despite a new job and a growing reputation, Mark Twain was not loved by all of his contemporaries. In his autobiography, he writes of his one and only duel fought. After exchanging biting criticisms of each other's characters, Sam and James Laird, the editor of another rival paper in Virginia City, entered into an ink-and-paper feud. With the support of his friend and co-worker Steve Gillis, an ostensible waif of a type-setter at the Enterprise, Clemens challenged Laird to a duel. He challenged him as Mark Twain, of course, and, as was the medium of their feud, in the newspaper. Clemens seemed to have forgotten that he was a terrible shot. Lucky enough, when the moment came, both men missed their mark, and, in the anxiety of what almost was, decided to call a truce. Handshakes finally settled the matter.

Then, the authorities arrived. While the commandments contained within the Virginia City law book could be held on a napkin, there was a strict no-dueling rule. The penalty was death by hanging. Deciding the town had little to offer now in the way of opportunity, Clemens and Gillis decided to head west—to San Francisco (Fleischman, 88-89). In his version of the story, Powers reports that the duel never happened—that in fact Clemens and Gillis got cold feet, and instead boarded a train to San Francisco the same time that they had called for the duel to occur in print. The Nevada Historical Society, however, claims to have the rusted remnants of Clemens' 1858 Remington pistol (Kane). In either case, Sam now had a reason to run and a roommate to keep him company.

In 1864, San Francisco was a bustling metropolis of bohemians. While its landscape certainly proved soothing to Sam's temperament, the work he found in the bay city could not hold his attention. He landed a job at the Morning Call, a local newspaper that had formally purchased several of his Enterprise letters as freelance pieces. The work was menial, and yet his life remained transient and luxurious. Sam and Gillis stayed at the Occidental Hotel—“Heaven on the half shell,” as he later wrote—and frequently enjoyed the luxury of fine meals and liquor. They also participated in the wanderlust of the artistic beach culture, moving from dwelling to dwelling while relying upon on the kindness of strangers.

This transient existence could only be a vacation for Sam Clemens. Soon he was heading into the mountains yet again with Gillis' brothers in mining camps, trying his luck once more in prospecting. He was largely unsuccessful. His family, specifically Orion, urged him to consider a more serious literary and lecturing career. He started frequenting the Gillis cabin in Tuolumne County, about one hundred miles East of San Fransisco. The cabin sat upon hill quaintly named “Jackass.” Powers writes that “[t]here wasn't much to do on Jackass Hill except drink whiskey, subsist on beans and bad coffee, and talk. It rained constantly,” and the men “amused one another by telling tales” (Powers, 150).

On one such excursion to Jackass Hill, in late February of 1865, the weather cleared. Clemens and the Gillis brothers decided to try some mining at Angel's Camp, a city in Calaveras County, California. There, at a tavern, Clemens and the Mississippians overheard a drunken tale about a frog. Sam “jotted the story down in [his] notebook,” and indeed this “jotting” dated February 6th relays the following:

Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C's frog full of shot & he couldn't jump—the stranger's frog won. (Clemens, Letters)

The seed was planted. On February 20th, the men returned from Angel's Camp, and “while the others picked away at their mining claims,” Twain wrote “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”— at least, the first draft of it. He continued to work on it heavily until mid-October, creating at least two complete drafts. Finally, the finished product was published in the November edition of an Eastern newspaper, the Saturday Press. Twain had intended the story to be included in a collection of sketches by Artemus Ward, but Ward's editor got ahold of it first, forwarding it to a friend, Henry Clapp, “bohemian editor” of the New York-based Press, and Twain became an overnight success; the sketch “launch[ed] Mark Twain into the elusive vapor of national fame” (Powers, 154).

The sketch itself “scored a direct hit upon the American postwar funny bone” (Powers, 154), and it spread backwards toward Sam in San Fransisco rapidly, reprinted in daily papers and artsy journals, moving inward back to its origins. In December, it was finally printed in the Californian, where Clemens was a frequent contributor, now renamed “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Straightforward, “benign” (Powers, 155), and vernacular, the deadpan narrative uses the medium of storytelling as a self-satire and dialect (specifically Pike County, Missouri) as its medium. “The humorous story is told gravely,” Mark Twain himself explained, and advised that “the teller does his best to conceal the fact he even dimly suspects there is anything funny about it” (Twain, How To Tell A Story, 4).

Onward and Upward

After the success of “Jumping Frog,” Clemens was offered the opportunity to visit Hawaii—in 1866 known as the Sandwich Islands. He had a series of letters published in the Sacramento Union as Mark Twain, the “Honolulu Correspondent” in which he characterized the island and its natives, and offered distinctly Twainian insight for Americans as to the island's charms and disparities. He returned with a reputation for excellent travel writing. He then took the Wardian plunge, and planned his first series of lectures with his travels as the subject.

On October 2, 1866, “A Lecture on the Sandwich Islands,” took place at the Academy of Music. The advert for the event read, “Doors open at 7 o'clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock.” The line drew an enormous crowd, and Mark Twain was an instant success. His deadpan delivery had the audience giddy, and he immediately planned a circuit around California and then the Northeast. As his fame spread, Clemens felt he was outgrowing the West; his itch for traveling returned with a vengeance.

In December, Sam found a way to leave the West for good. The young Ward “negotiated a deal “with the Alta California in San Francisco as a “Traveling Correspondent.” On December 15th, Clemens set sail on the America, a steamship heading Southeast towards Nicaragua and onward toward the Northeast. In 1866, Justin Kaplan writes, those “in a hurry” to get to the East from California “still retraced the route of the Forty-niners,” traveling by ship “from San Francisco, down the coast of Mexico to San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua, crossed the Isthmus jungle by mule, wagon, and boat, and at Greytown, on the eastern side,” the passengers boarded a ship heading North to New York Harbor (Kaplan, 13). Powers characterizes Sam's Western years as ending on a high note, “on a plane of accomplishment and prestige” (Powers, 171). Once a “Civil War fugitive,” a “failed silver miner,” and most recently a “hard-drinking

journalist and provocateur,” Sam Clemens “had risen” (Powers, 171). He gave in a farewell lecture in San Francisco before he departed, calling “the California of the future” a modern-day “promised land” (Kaplan, 14).

Despite “Mark Twain” heading the list of Very Important Passengers, Clemens' cruise to Central America on the first-class deck was anything but prestigious. His captain, Wakeman, had a fouler mouth than Bixby (which, admittedly, Clemens adored), but his brassy, hard-drinking masculinity was the only kind the fairer female passengers could stand. Clemens recalls being rebuffed and whispered about during his voyage, overhearing the scoffing whispers of wealthy ladies intoning, “Him? First class?” Despite such a pretense, at least six people, including an infant, died of cholera on board before the America had made it to its destination. Once they reach port in San Juan del Sur, an outbreak of cholera was reported among the six hundred or so passengers waiting to travel back westward. Clemens and the others heading East “climbed into carriages and onto horses, and began the beautiful, perilous twelve-mile isthmus crossing” (Powers, 173). Those remaining passengers who made the trek boarded another steamship toward New York. On January 12, 1867, “after twenty-seven and one-half days, two more mechanical breakdowns, and another bout of frigid weather and rough seas” (Powers, 174), the San Francisco sailed into New York Harbor.

Make Your Mark

When Sam Clemens arrived in New York City, two churches towered over the rest of the city. It would be eight years until the “first wave of skyscrapers” which adorn New York's infamous skyline began to sprout.* Still, the city was coursing with opportunistic, “hustler

energy,” with the boom of industrialism in the East. Churning factories, railroads, and retail stores sought a new civilian market in the post-war East. Department stores began to emerge, and with them came masses of consumer-minded women. Waves of people began filling out the streets of Manhattan, which had also become one of the busiest shipping hubs of the Western world, and the island was approaching hysterical gridlock—Powers notes that tunneling for subway lines would begin just a year after Clemens arrived.

Despite the massive changes that had occurred in the fourteen years since Clemens had walked the streets of Manhattan, he was eager to keep up his momentum as a published writer, and knew he was in the right place to do it. The rich, foreseeing economic ruin, had settled uptown as the poor immigrants, blue collar workers, and prostitutes settled in the Five Points section of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Crime was frequent, violent, and feared by the police. Teeming with class distinctions, five nationally circulated newspapers, and the latest fashion trends, New York City became the cultural and commercial center that it had never before been.

“Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man,” he famously wrote to the Western readers of Alta California (Powers, 176). But at the top of his list was not simply to have more sketches published, nor to be featured in another collection featuring Artemus Ward as the top billing-author. Sam wanted to write a book, get it published, and watch his fame skyrocket as it did in Nevada and California. The opposite occurred: with his Sandwich Island manuscript clutched in his fists, Twain searched unsuccessfully for representation. He was rejected from multiple agents and by publishing houses all over the city, but continued to have his New York letters published in the Alta California.

During the early months of 1867, Twain performed some lectures in Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi, and Illinois. Upon his return to New York, he found a check from the Alta California awaiting him. It was to pay for his ticket upon a ship known as the Quaker City, which was scheduled to depart New York in the early summer. In the meantime, Clemens took the spring to finally follow through on his promise to Artemus Ward. His New York lecture debut on April 23, 1867, was incredibly well-received, as has been his lectures in the Mid-West. Critics praised his Ward-esque delivery, his deadpan cadence, and his gnarled, Western camaraderie, which endeared him so graciously to his audiences. His success on this front was followed by a monthlong bout of depression. “[W]orn out and miserable, restless full of self-accusation,” and nervous about the lack of consistency with which he wrote to Alta, Clemens was in need of a change in scenery. He spent one night in a New York jail after being arrested for brawling in the street, and wrote home to Alta about the experience in a series of four letters written in four days. He started this pace in mid-May, and hardly slowed for a month—come early June, it was finally time for his long, lucrative voyage abroad.

Innocents Aboard

On June 8, 1867, Sam Clemens boarded the Quaker City for the voyage that would irrevocably change his life forever. To characterize it is to barely understand the satirical playground Twain found himself in. The trip itself, whose final destination was Palestine, came at a steep price—around $1,250 for the passage excluding money needed on land. Furthermore, the passengers were cut from Northeastern genteel cloth, “late-middle-aged, prosperous, pious, and abstinent” (Kaplan, 39). Kaplan writes, “[c]reating the conditions for satire, Clemens had

almost deliberately misapprehended the character of the venture from the very start” (Kaplan, 39). But the company proved just fine. While most passengers had come at the hopes of ingratiating themselves to men of some certain “celebrity,” they instead found themselves disappointed to learn that the only notable person on board was an up-and-coming, crude young writer named Sam Clemens.

While on the Quaker City, Clemens spent his days walking the decks of the ship entertaining individuals and impressing them with his tall tales, comedic imitations, and reading to them in French. He particularly found himself ingratiated to a young eighteen-year-old named Charles Langdon, a wealthy son of a coal fortune from Elmira, New York, and the brother of Clemens' future wife, Livy. Sam is said to have first encountered Livy in the form of a miniature bust that Charles kept in his room. But the passenger with arguably the greatest and longest lasting influence over Clemens—or perhaps more precisely, Mark Twain, was a woman named Mary Fairbanks.

He called her “mother.” Such was the extent of the intimate (unromantic) relationship between the middle-aged Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks and thirty-two year old Samuel Clemens. “By the time the ship was in the Mediterranean,” writes Kaplan, “Mary Fairbanks had becomes his mentor in manners and morals, even in writing” (Kaplan, 45). Sam called himself her “Cub” and her “Reformed Prodigal” (Kaplan, 44). He wrote home about her, depicting her as “the most refined, intelligent, and cultivated lady on the ship, and altogether the kindest and the best.” He continues, “she sewed my buttons on, kept my clothes in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter deck on moonlit promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits” (Kaplan, 44).

Fairbanks' genteel, matronly femininity was the sort that Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer “lit out from” (Kaplan, 44). She had noticed something in him, unrecognizable but which undoubtedly “interests and attracts,” she once said (Kaplan, 45). She corrected his seated slouch and refined his “scarcely genteel appearance” and treated it all (and him) as a challenge (Kaplan, 45). Shrewd and impeccably raised, she inspired him to reject the writerly instinct in himself, and instead attempt a “suspension of identity” (Kaplan, 45). He was “obedient,” writes Kaplan, “formative, and eager to learn […] [w]ithout hypocrisy” (Kaplan, 45). Perhaps he considered conforming to her standards an “experiment,” his “willing submission to her literary standards” gained him a lucrative audience and an assimilated charm. Were it not for Fairbanks, one may not know the subtle, witty, innocent Twain who so winningly disposed of vulgarities in the hopes of providing just enough concealed innuendo. The Mark Twain so revered today may have drowned in Mediterranean had it not been for Fairbanks and the subsequent women who edited, refined, and coached the drawling Missourian into approving presentation. That said, the effect Fairbanks had on Twain's writing never quite touched Clemens, whose persona on board the Quaker City and among male counterparts remained classically, brazenly uncouth. Still, with Mark Twain firmly established as the all-American funny-man, Clemens had begun his foray into a facet of society he had yet to touch.