Mark Twain summary

All those details, the raw material of Mark Twain’s art, might have remained locked up in unread notebooks if it hadn’t been for the Civil War. When it came in early 1861, it promptly sank the steamboat trade and forced Sam Clemens to come up with a new plan.

In the summer, the former riverboat pilot slung an old squirrel rifle over his shoulder, mounted a donkey, and rode off to enlist in the Missouri State Guard. He lasted two weeks – enough time, he later said, to learn more about retreating than the man who’d invented it.

On the voyage to the Holy Land, a fellow traveler showed Twain a picture of his sister, Olivia Langdon. It was love at first sight. He met her in person when he got back to New York. Twain took Livy, as he called her, on a date to see Charles Dickens reading from one of his novels. That was in the fall of 1867. They were married in early 1870.

This was a gilded age and Langdon, the daughter of a coal baron, belonged to its oligarchical 1 percent. Twain’s “low-down tastes,” it turned out, were more than compatible with a life of luxury. The couple moved into a starter home provided by Langdon’s father: a mansion that came with its own staff. For more than a decade, the couple traveled the world in style, renting entire hotel floors in fashionable European cities. Twain continued giving his lectures. From London to Vienna to Trieste, readers lined up to see the famous American. Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler were just two of the luminaries of the day among their number.

Success went to Twain’s head: he began to think everything he touched turned to gold.

When he considered greatness, he wasn’t thinking about his place in the canon – he was dreaming of cold hard cash. Most progressive intellectuals of the day loathed America’s robber barons; Twain loved them. They reminded him of the frontiersmen he’d known as a young man: they were go-getters, risk-takers, empire-builders. Mark Twain, however, was a truly terrible entrepreneur – so bad, in fact, that it became a running joke. The Washington Post advised its readers to keep a close eye on his investments and move their money literally anywhere else.

Twain was just shy of 50 when he completed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It ends with its hero eyeing an open horizon and a future full of possibility. He was almost 60 when he drafted the sequel. The protagonists of the first book, now grown old, return from their adventures to “talk the old times.” But it’s no good: “All that was beautiful,” they conclude, lies “under mold.” They die realizing that their lives have been wasted. 

That unhappy story was never told in full, but the first novel Twain completed after the Paige Compositor affair’s sorry end was just as gloomy. Published in 1894, Tom Sawyer Abroad asks readers if they think its hero was satisfied after all his adventuring. No, says the narrator, he wasn’t – “it just poisoned him for more.” There’s a stark change in tone between Twain’s early and late work. The former was written by America’s most joyful writer; the latter by a man who could only put pen to paper when he had death and disappointment on his mind.

Halley’s Comet was as close to our planet as it gets when Sam Clemens was born on November 30, 1835. It was in the sky again when Mark Twain died 74 years later on April 21, 1910. The Almighty, Twain said shortly before his death, had planned for these “two unaccountable freaks” to come in and go out together.

American literature, cultural critic Lauren Michele Jackson writes, was old enough “to regard itself as a tradition” by 1910. Twain, who had never been greatly interested in canons or pantheons, was its founding father. No one before him had tried to capture the sound of America’s living speech. His success in doing so liberated the nation’s writers from the constraints of formal British English. As Hemingway said, American writers after Twain have largely trodden paths first cleared by the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.