“Anger is an acid that does more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” .....Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens; November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910) – an American author and humourist who delighted world with stories of boyhood adventure and with commentary on mans faults that is humorous even while it probes, often bitterly, the roots of human behaviour. ________________________ Mark Twain Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the frontier village of Florida, Missouri in the family of Jane (née Lampton) and John Marshall Clemens (an attorney and judge). He was the sixth of a total of seven children in the family, but only three of his siblings survived childhood. He spent his boyhood in nearby Hannibal, on the banks of the Mississippi River, observing its busy life, fascinated by its romance, but chilled by the violence and bloodshed it bred. Clemens was eleven years old when his lawyer father died of pneumonia. In order to help the family earn money, the young Clemens began working as a store clerk and a delivery boy. Then, he became a printers apprentice, working as a typesetter and later even as a contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. His comic sketch The Dandy Frightening the Squatter was published by a sportsmens magazine in Boston (Massachusetts) and that earned him considerable popularity. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the newly-formed International Typographical Union, the printers union, and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school. He also did a stint as a steamboat river pilot on Mississippi until the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-65), when Northern forces clashed with those of the South over slavery and secession (the Souths desire to leave the Union). Clemens travelled to Nevada in 1861, where he invested carelessly in timber and silver mining. He settled down to newspaper work in Virginia City, until his reckless pen and redheaded temper brought him into conflict with local authorities; it seemed profitable to escape to California. Meanwhile he had adopted the pen name of Mark Twain, a rivermans term for water that is just safe enough for navigation. Four years later, Twain wrote a short story, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which first brought him national attention. Most of his western writing was hastily, often carelessly, done and he later did little to preserve it. That year, Sacramento Union journal commissioned Mark Twain to report on a new excursion service to Hawaii. His accounts as published in the newspaper provided the basis for his first successful lectures and years later were collected in Letters from the Sandwich Islands (1938) and Letters from Honolulu (1939). His travel accounts were so well received that he was contracted in 1866 to become a traveling correspondent for the Alta California; he would circle the globe, writing letters. Twain married Olivia Langdon in 1870. After a brief residence in upstate New York as an editor and part owner of the Buffalo Express, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived for twenty years; there three daughters were born, and prosperity as a writer and lecturer (in England in 1872 and 1873) seemed guaranteed. “Roughing It” (1872) recounted Mark Twains travels to Nevada and reprinted some of the Sandwich Island letters. Mark Twains account of steam-boating experiences for the “Atlantic Monthly” (1875; expanded to Life on the Mississippi, 1883) captured the beauty, glamour, and danger of the Mississippi River. Boyhood memories of life beside that river were written into “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1875), which immediately attracted young and old alike. With more exotic and foreign settings, “The Prince and the Pauper” (1882) and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court” (1889) attracted readers also, but “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1885), in which Mark Twain again returned to the river scenes he knew best, was considered unacceptable by many. Twains “Tom Sawyer” better organized than “Huckleberry Finn” is a narrative of innocent boyhood play that accidentally discovers evil as Tom and Huck witness a murder by Injun Joe in a graveyard at midnight. The boys run away, are thought dead, but turn up at their own funeral. Tom and Huck decide to seek out the murderer and the reward offered for his capture. It is Tom and his sweetheart who, while lost in a cave, discover the hiding place of Injun Joe. Though the townspeople unwittingly seal the murderer in the cave, they close the entrance only to keep adventuresome boys like Tom out of future trouble. In the end, it is innocent play and boyish adventuring which really triumph. “Huckleberry Finn” is considered by many to be Mark Twains finest creation. Huck lacks Toms imagination; he is a simple boy with little education. One measure of his character is a proneness to deceit, which seems instinctive, a trait shared by other wild things and relating him to nature in contrast to Toms tradition-grounded, book-learned, imaginative deceptions. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” – a loosely strung series of adventures, can be viewed as the story of a quest for freedom and an escape from what society requires in exchange for success. Joined in flight by a black companion, Jim, who seeks freedom from slavery, Huck discovers that the Mississippi is peaceful (though he is found to be only partially correct) but that the world along its shores is full of trickery, including his own, and by cruelty and murder. When the raft on which he and Jim are floating down the river is invaded by two criminals, Huck first becomes their assistant in swindles but is finally the agent of their exposure. Whatever its faults, Twains “Huckleberry Finn” is a classic. Variously interpreted, it is often thought to suggest more than it reveals, speaking of what man has done to confuse himself about his right relation to nature. It can also be thought of as a treatment of mans failures in dealing with his fellows and of the corruption that mans only escape is in flight, perhaps even from himself. Yet it is also an apparently artless story of adventure and escape so simply and directly told that novelist Ernest Hemingway (c.1899-1961) once said that all American literature begins with this book. After a series of unsuccessful business ventures in Europe, Twain returned to the United States in 1900. His writings grew increasingly bitter, especially after his wifes death in 1905. “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900) exposed corruption in a small, typical American town. “Eves Diary” (1906), written partly in memory of his wife, showed a man saved from bungling only through the influence of a good woman. In 1906 Twain began to dictate his autobiography to Albert B. Paine, recording scattered memories without any particular order. Portions from it were published in periodicals later that year. With the income from the excerpts of his autobiography, he built a large house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Stormfield. Twain passed through a period of deep depression, beginning in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivias death in 1904 and Jeans on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom. On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the “North American Review”. In April that year, Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all she owned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith, George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session. Initially resistant, Twain admitted that four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him. Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain exchanged letters with his Angel Fish girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his lifes chief delight. Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters (D.Litt.) in 1907. In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying, I came in with Halleys Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I dont go out with Halleys Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together. His prediction was dead accurate, and Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding (Connecticut), one day after the comets closest approach to earth. Upon hearing of Twains death, US President William Howard Taft said, Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature ! Twains funeral was at the Old Brick Presbyterian Church in New York. He is buried in his wifes family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. His grave is marked by a 12-foot (Mark Twain) monument, placed there by his surviving daughter, Clara. There is also a smaller headstone. Although he expressed a preference for cremation (for example in “Life on the Mississippi”), he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word. ___________________________________ By AVDHESH SHUKLA
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:17:47 +0000
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