While in St. Louis, Clemens became a river pilot's apprentice. He became a licensed river pilot in Clemens' pseudonym, Mark Twain, comes from his days as a river pilot. It is a river term which means two fathoms or feet when the depth of water for a boat is being sounded.
Because the river trade was brought to a stand still by the Civil War in , Clemens began working as a newspaper reporter for several newspapers all over the United States. In , Clemens married Olivia Langdon, and they had four children, one of whom died in infancy and two who died in their twenties. Their surviving child, Clara, lived to be 88, and had one daughter.
He wrote a great deal he did not intend to publish during those years, but he did publish Following the Equator , a relatively serious account of his world lecture tour. Palpable tokens of public approbation are the three honorary degrees conferred on Clemens in his last years—from Yale University in , from the University of Missouri in , and, the one he most coveted, from Oxford University in When he traveled to Missouri to receive his honorary Doctor of Laws, he visited old friends in Hannibal along the way.
He knew that it would be his last visit to his hometown. Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg , a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger. None of the manuscripts was ever completed, and they were posthumously combined and published in He also started What Is Man?
He began to dictate his autobiography, which he would continue to do until a few months before he died. The description may or may not be apt. At any rate, even though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, there was no particular reason for Clemens to be in a good mood.
The family, including Clemens himself, had suffered from one sort of ailment or another for a very long time. In his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy, and the search for a cure, or at least relief, had taken the family to different doctors throughout Europe.
She was violently ill in , and for a time Clemens was allowed to see her for only five minutes a day. Removing to Italy seemed to improve her condition, but that was only temporary. She died on June 5, The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve.
He would have yet another occasion to publish his grief. His daughter Jean died on Dec. The Death of Jean was written beside her deathbed. It is true that Clemens was bitter and lonely during his last years. In —07 he published selected chapters from his ongoing autobiography in the North American Review. Judging from the tone of the work, writing his autobiography often supplied Clemens with at least a wistful pleasure. These writings and others reveal an imaginative energy and humorous exuberance that do not fit the picture of a wholly bitter and cynical man.
He moved into his new house in Redding, Conn. It is an uneven but delightfully humorous story, one that critic and journalist H. Mencken ranked on a level with Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Little Bessie and Letters from the Earth both published posthumously were also written during this period, and, while they are sardonic, they are antically comic as well.
Clemens thought Letters from the Earth was so heretical that it could never be published. The letters did present unorthodox views—that God was something of a bungling scientist and human beings his failed experiment, that Christ, not Satan, devised hell, and that God was ultimately to blame for human suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy. Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man.
Clara Clemens married in October and left for Europe by early December. Jean died later that month. Clemens was too grief-stricken to attend the burial services, and he stopped working on his autobiography.
Perhaps as an escape from painful memories, he traveled to Bermuda in January By early April he was having severe chest pains. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine joined him, and together they returned to Stormfield. Clemens died on April The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine first published in full in Heaven goes by favor.
If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in. Only Clara survived him. As a humorist and as a moralist, Twain worked best in short pieces.
In A True Story, told in an African American dialect, Twain transformed the resources of the typically American humorous story into something serious and profoundly moving. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is relentless social satire; it is also the most formally controlled piece Twain ever wrote. The originality of the longer works is often to be found more in their conception than in their sustained execution. Twain was not the first Anglo-American to treat the problems of race and racism in all their complexity, but, along with that of Herman Melville, his treatment remains of vital interest more than a hundred years later.
His ability to swiftly and convincingly create a variety of fictional characters rivals that of Charles Dickens. And his mastery of spoken language, of slang and argot and dialect, gave these figures a voice.
Howells, who had known most of the important American literary figures of the 19th century and thought them to be more or less like one another, believed that Twain was unique. Twain will always be remembered first and foremost as a humorist, but he was a great deal more—a public moralist, popular entertainer, political philosopher, travel writer, and novelist.
Perhaps it is too much to claim, as some have, that Twain invented the American point of view in fiction, but that such a notion might be entertained indicates that his place in American literary culture is secure. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months prematurely on November 30, , in tiny Florida, Missouri, and remained sickly and frail until he was 7 years old.
Clemens was the sixth of seven children, only three of whom survived to The Roman politician and general Mark Antony 83—30 B. His romantic and political Impressionism was a radical art movement that began in the late s, centered primarily around Parisian painters. Impressionists rebelled against classical subject matter and embraced modernity, desiring to create works that reflected the world in which they lived. Before Harold Arlin voiced the first Major League Baseball broadcast on August 5, , the only way to experience a game was to go to the ballpark.
The only way to follow scores was to look up at a wooden scoreboard to see them changed manually. Legends have sat behind Jordan's speech Bauhaus was an influential art and design movement that began in in Weimar, Germany.
The movement encouraged teachers and students to pursue their crafts together in design studios and workshops. The school moved to Dessau in and then to Berlin in , after which Surrealism is an artistic movement that has had a lasting impact on painting, sculpture, literature, photography and film.
Cubism is an artistic movement, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which employs geometric shapes in depictions of human and other forms. Over time, the geometric touches grew so intense that they sometimes overtook the represented forms, creating a more pure level of Art Nouveau was an art and design movement that grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th Century.
Art Nouveau highlighted curvaceous lines, often inspired by plants and flowers, as well as geometric patterns. Art Deco was a sprawling design sensibility that Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The next year, he embarked on an around-the-world speaking tour in order to earn money to pay off his debts, which he was able to do within several years. Mark Twain with family, circa Olivia Clemens died in at age 58, while on April 21, , her renowned husband, whose health had been in decline for a number of months, died at age 74 at his home in Redding, Connecticut.
Their surviving child, Clara, died in at age Clara Clemens had one child, Nina Gabrilowitsch, who passed away in Gabrilowitsch was childless, so there are no direct descendants of Samuel Clemens alive today.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland.
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