Learning the River
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi, in a slaveholding town his fiction would later dismantle. His father died when he was eleven and he was apprenticed to a printer, then wrote for his brother's newspaper. At twenty-two he talked his way into training as a steamboat pilot and earned his license in 1859, a job he loved and remembered as the freest of his life. His brother Henry died in a steamboat boiler explosion, a loss he blamed himself for ever after.
The Civil War closed the river. He spent about two weeks in an irregular Confederate militia, an episode he later turned into a rueful comic essay, then left for Nevada with another brother. Mining made him no money and journalism made him a name. The pen name came from a river call for safe water, and the story that made him nationally famous in 1865 was a tall tale about a jumping frog. The travel book Innocents Abroad in 1869 turned fame into a career.
The Book That Kept Getting Banned
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in Britain in 1884 and in America in 1885, put a runaway boy and a self-emancipating man named Jim on a raft and let the boy's conscience wrestle with the law and the church he had been raised in. The Concord Public Library removed it as coarse within months, the first of many bans, though later objections have come from the opposite direction, over its constant use of a racial slur and an ending that turns Jim's freedom into a boyish game.
Both arguments have force, and the honest answer is that the book contains its own contradiction. Twain wrote from inside the language of a slaveholding society while attacking its morality, and his willingness to let his hero choose damnation over betrayal remains one of the sharpest moments in American fiction. He later paid the tuition of one of the first Black students at Yale Law School and wrote in support of it, and he denounced lynching in an essay so scorching he withheld it, fearing it would end his southern readership.
Ruin, Repayment, and Rage
He was a disastrous investor. He poured money into the Paige typesetting machine, a beautiful mechanical failure, and into a publishing house that collapsed, and in 1894 he declared bankruptcy at nearly sixty. Rather than settle for cents on the dollar, he took a lecture tour around the world and paid his creditors in full, a decision that restored both his finances and his public standing. The tour also fed Following the Equator, a book far angrier about colonialism than anything he had written before.
Grief did the rest. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896 while he was abroad, his wife Olivia in 1904, and his daughter Jean in 1909. He became a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, denounced the American war in the Philippines, and wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy in 1905 to expose the atrocities in the Congo Free State. Born in a year of Halley's Comet, he expected to go out with its return, and he died in April 1910, the day after it reached perihelion.
