Mark Twain 519Mark Twain
While it was easy to romanticize the West, that
region lent itself to the realistic approach. Almost of
necessity, novelists writing about the West described
coarse characters from the lower levels of society
and dealt with crime and violence. It would have
been difficult indeed to write a genteel romance
about a mining camp. The outstanding figure of
western literature, the first great American realist,
was Mark Twain.
Twain, whose real name was Samuel L. Clemens,
was born in 1835. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri,
on the banks of the Mississippi. After mastering the
printer’s trade and working as a riverboat pilot, he went
west to Nevada in 1861. The wild, rough life of
Virginia City fascinated him, but prospecting got him
nowhere, and he became a reporter for the Territorial
Enterprise.Soon he was publishing humorous stories
about the local life under the nom de plume Mark
Twain. In 1865, while working in California, he wrote
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a
story that brought him national recognition. A tour of
Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 to 1868 led to The
Innocents Abroad(1869), which made him famous.
Twain’s greatness stemmed from his keen
reportorial eye and ear, his eagerness to live life to
the full, his marvelous sense of humor, and his abil-
ity to be at once in society and outside it, and to
love humanity yet be repelled by human vanity and
perversity. He epitomized the zest and adaptability
of his age and also its materialism.
No contemporary pursued the
almighty dollar more zealously. An
inveterate speculator, he made a
fortune with his pen and lost it in
foolish business ventures. He was
equally at home and equally suc-
cessful on the Great River of his
childhood, in the mining camps,
and in the eastern bourgeois soci-
ety of his mature years. But every
prize slipped through his fingers.
Twain died a dark pessimist, sur-
rounded by adulation yet alone, an
alien and a stranger in the land he
loved and knew so well.
Twain excelled every contem-
porary in the portrayal of character.
In his biting satire, The Gilded Age
(1873), he created that magnifi-
cent mountebank Colonel Beriah
Sellers, purveyor of eyewash (“the
Infallible Imperial Oriental Optic
Liniment”) and false hopes, ridicu-
lous, unscrupulous, but lovable. In
Huckleberry Finn(1884), his masterpiece, his por-
trait of the slave Jim, loyal, patient, naive, yet withal
a man, is unforgettable. When Huck takes advan-
tage of Jim’s credulity merely for his own amuse-
ment, the slave turns from him coldly and says,
“Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is
dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em
ashamed.” And there is Huck Finn himself, full of
devilry, romantic, amoral (up to a point), and at
bottom the complete realist. When Miss Watson
tells him he can get anything he wants by praying
for it, he makes the effort, is disillusioned, and con-
cludes, “If a body can get anything they pray for,
why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost
on pork?... Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, I
says to myself, there ain’t nothing in it.”
Whether directly, as in The Innocents Abroadand
in his fascinating account of the world of the river
pilot,Life on the Mississippi(1883), or when trans-
formed by his imagination in works of fiction such as
Tom Sawyer (1876) and A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court(1889), Mark Twain always put
much of his own experience and feeling into his work.
A story, he told a fellow author, “must be written
with the blood out of a man’s heart.” His innermost
confusions, the clash between his recognition of the
pretentiousness and meanness of human beings and
his wish to be accepted by society, added depths and
overtones to his writing that together with his comic
genius give it lasting appeal. He could not rise aboveA sidewheeler on the Mississippi. In 1856 Samuel Clemens became an apprentice to a steamboat
pilot and spent the next four years—among the most carefree in his life—plying the waters of the
Mississippi River. In his writings, the river was a metaphor for a journey of discovery. A century
later, the highway would function in a similar way for many American novelists.