Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 225“the only thing worth giving to the race,” to look back on one’s own childhood was
to give oneself “a cloudy sense of having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far
off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate.” It was rather, and more simply, that
Twain recognized intuitively that his years as a boy and youth, in the pre-Civil War
South, had formed him for good and ill. So to explore those years was to explore the
often equivocal nature of his own vision. It was also, and more complexly, that Twain
also sensed that the gap, the division he felt between his self and his experiences
before and after the war was, in its detail unique of course, but also typical,
representative. So to understand that gap, that division, was to begin at least to
understand his nation and its times.
Twain moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri
when he was 4. A small town with a population of about a thousand, Hannibal was
a former frontier settlement that had become a backwater. Leaving school at the age
of 12, Twain received his real education as a journeyman printer; and, having spent
his first eighteen years in the South, he began to travel widely. His travels eventually
brought him back to the Mississippi where, in the late 1850s, he trained and was
licensed as a riverboat pilot. After his years in Hannibal, this was the most formative
period of his life. “I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since,”
Twain was to say later, in Life on the Mississippi (1883). “The reason is plain: a pilot,
in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that
lived in earth.” Piloting taught Twain lessons in freedom that were to be immensely
valuable to him later. But when the Civil War began, the riverboats ceased operation
and, after a brief period serving with a group of Confederate volunteers, he traveled
west. There, he spent the rest of the war prospecting for silver with his brother and
then working with Bret Harte as a journalist in San Francisco. It was while working
as a journalist in the West, in 1863, that he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain.
And in 1865 he made that name famous with the tall tale, “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County.” Brief though it is, the tale is notable not least because it
reveals many of the vital ingredients in Twain’s art: the rough humor of the Southwest
and Western frontier, a recognizable teller of the tale (in this case, a character called
Simon Wheeler), above all, a creative use of the vernacular and the sense of a story
springing out of an oral tradition, being told directly to us, its audience. Twain now
began touring the lecture circuits. His lively personality and quotable remarks made
him immensely popular. His lecture tours also reinforced his habit of writing in the
vernacular, the American idiom: “I amend the dialect stuff,” he once said, “by talking
and talking it till it sounds right.” His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), appeared just before he set sail on a trip
to Europe and the Holy Land. This was followed by his account of that trip, in
Innocents Abroad, his humorous depiction of his travels west in Roughing It, and a
satirical portrait of boom times after the Civil War, The Gilded Age (1873), written
in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner.
Twain first turned to the matter of Hannibal in a series of articles published in the
Atlantic Monthly entitled “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Revised and expanded,
with new material added (some of it, as Twain candidly admitted, “taken fromGGray_c03.indd 225ray_c 03 .indd 225 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM