Too Soon, A Man

Samuel Langhorne Clemens alias Mark Twain had a number of jobs before he became a famous writer. Clemens childhood was a difficult one, beginning with his premature birth on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth of seven children born to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens. Only three of those children would survive to adulthood. Clemens, himself was sickly and frail until he was 7 years old. In 1839 the family moved to the town of Hannibal, Missouri. His popular novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” were set in a fictionalized version of Hannibal. John Marshall Clemens became a justice of the peace in Hannibal but struggled financially. Samuel Clemens was just 11 years old when his 49-year-old father died of pneumonia. Clemens’ life was about to change forever.

In 1848, the year after his father’s death, Clemens went to work full-time as an apprentice printer at a newspaper in Hannibal. Remember that he was just a boy of 12 years at the time. In 1851, he moved over to a typesetting job at a local paper owned by his older brother, Orion. This would have been a promotion of sorts, but it also sparked something in him that would eventually make him the man what the world would know. He began to write a handful of short stories, and so began his lifelong writing career, although not on that exact day. He would have to do a few other things first. Nevertheless, some of his stories were published. In 1853, when he was 17 years old, Clemens left Hannibal and spent the next several years living in places such as New York City, Philadelphia and Keokuk, Iowa, and working as a printer.

In 1857, he decided to try something new, and signed on as a pilot’s apprentice on a river boat while on his way to Mississippi. He had been commissioned to write a series of comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post, but after writing five, decided he’d rather be a pilot than a writer. this decision would also lead to a tragedy when, in 1858, while employed on a boat called the Pennsylvania, he got his younger brother, Henry, a job aboard the vessel. He worked on the Pennsylvania until early June. Then, on June 13, disaster struck when the Pennsylvania, traveling near Memphis, experienced a deadly boiler explosion. Among the dead was 19-year-old Henry. Nevertheless, Clemens continued to work as a pilot’s apprentice and on April 9, 1859, a 23-year-old Clemens received his steamboat pilot’s license. He piloted his own boats for two years, until the Civil War halted steamboat traffic. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the pseudonym “Mark Twain” from a boatman’s call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation, hence Twain. When he returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by “Mark Twain” and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

He moved to San Francisco in 1864, to work as a reporter. While there, he wrote the story that made him famous, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” He traveled to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union in 1866. After his stint in Hawaii, he traveled the world writing accounts for papers in California and New York, which he later published as the popular book The Innocents Abroad in 1869. In 1870, when he was 35 years old, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, who was the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he continued to write travel accounts and lecture. In 1875, his novel “Tom Sawyer” was published, followed by “Life on the Mississippi” in 1883, and his masterpiece “Huckleberry Finn” in 1885. Some bad investments left the Clemens family bankrupt after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, but he won back his financial standing with his next three books. He and Olivia had four children, their son Langdon died of diphtheria in 1872 at the age of 19 months. They also had three daughters: Susy (1872–1896), Clara (1874–1962), and Jean (1880–1909). Clara Clemens had one child, Nina Gabrilowitsch, who passed away in 1966, leaving no direct descendants of Samuel Clemens “Mark Twain.” Clemens and his family moved to Italy in 1903. Sadly, his wife died on June 5, 1904. Her death left him sad and bitter, and his work, while still humorous, grew distinctly darker. Clemens “Mark Twain” died in 1910. As he had predicted, or more likely chosen, “Mark Twain” died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, at Stormfield, the mansion he had built in Redding, Connecticut…one day after Halley’s Comet was at its closest to the Sun and a month before the comet the passed near the Earth. I believe he was tired of living. He missed his wife, and most of his children had predeceased him. He was done, and simply ready to go home.