Twain And Clemens

One American Voice

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man who would become Mark Twain, is often forgotten in the shadow of his larger-than-life penname. But it was this man and his towering personality who would go on to “found the American voice.”[1] Twain was born on November 30, 1835, and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which would become the inspiration for the settings for two of his most famous novels: Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

Twain travelled throughout his life, going to the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Europe, and the Middle East.[2] These travels often inspired his writing. His trip through the American West inspired a novel called Roughing It. It was this worldliness that so interested his future wife, Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon, who had only experienced the world through books.[3] Livy’s “gravitas and the cerebral cast of her personality must have compelled him from the moment of their first meeting in New York [in 1868],” and indeed it did: though he “fumbled” the lecture, he was enchanted by Livy.[4] Almost immediately they began to write each other, and in 1870 they were married. They would go on to have four children, but each child would die tragically young.

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Twain died on April 21, 1910, due to a heart attack. By the time he died he’d written at least twenty-eight books and numerous short stories, firmly cementing himself in literary canon. He’s often depicted wearing a white suit, and evidence suggests that he began wearing the white suit after Livy’s death in 1904, though there is evidence of him wearing the suit before then.[5]

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Acerbic, hilarious, and magnetic, Mark Twain seemed to bear a near mythical figure, but he was very real. A father, a friend, a husband, and a writer, Twain emerged as a wide-eyed, ever listening observer capable of intense restlessness and optimism. Mark Twain left us his voice, but Samuel Clemens provided the bedrock for the man who would become America's voice.

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References:

[1]Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2005.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Twain, Mark. "Writings: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2." Accessed December 04, 2018. http://www.marktwainproject.org/homepage.html.