Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming. It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common.
His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic potentially lethal in those days was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety.
A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture. Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity.
Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. In January Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn. Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave.
He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.
In the oldest Clemens boy, Orion, returned from St. Louis, Mo. A year later he bought the Hannibal Journal, and Sam and his younger brother Henry worked for him. Some of those early sketches, such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter , appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals.
Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins. Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in with some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer, trying many occupations. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington , D.
During his time in the East, which lasted until early , he read widely and took in the sights of these cities. He was acquiring, if not a worldly air, at least a broader perspective than that offered by his rural background. Orion had moved briefly to Muscatine, Iowa , with their mother, where he had established the Muscatine Journal before relocating to Keokuk, Iowa, and opening a printing shop there.
Sam Clemens joined his brother in Keokuk in and was a partner in the business for a little over a year, but he then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio , to work as a typesetter. Still restless and ambitious, he booked passage in on a steamboat bound for New Orleans , La. Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice.
Because Bixby was an exceptional pilot and had a license to navigate the Missouri River and the upper as well as the lower Mississippi, lucrative opportunities several times took him upstream.
On those occasions, Clemens was transferred to other veteran pilots and thereby learned the profession more quickly and thoroughly than he might have otherwise. The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed. He met and fell in love with Laura Wright, eight years his junior. The courtship dissolved in a misunderstanding, but she remained the remembered sweetheart of his youth. He also arranged a job for his younger brother Henry on the riverboat Pennsylvania.
The boilers exploded, however, and Henry was fatally injured. Clemens was not on board when the accident occurred, but he blamed himself for the tragedy. His experience as a cub and then as a full-fledged pilot gave him a sense of discipline and direction he might never have acquired elsewhere. Before this period his had been a directionless knockabout life; afterward he had a sense of determined possibility.
He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch, River Intelligence , lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper. The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license.
He returned to Hannibal, where he joined the prosecessionist Marion Rangers, a ragtag lot of about a dozen men. After only two uneventful weeks, during which the soldiers mostly retreated from Union troops rumoured to be in the vicinity, the group disbanded. A few of the men joined other Confederate units, and the rest, along with Clemens, scattered. Twain would recall this experience, a bit fuzzily and with some fictional embellishments, in The Private History of the Campaign That Failed In that memoir he extenuated his history as a deserter on the grounds that he was not made for soldiering.
Like the fictional Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he was to publish in , Clemens then lit out for the territory. Clemens submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter.
He was again embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he succeeded. The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in to its peak production in the late s.
Nearby Virginia City was known for its gambling and dance halls, its breweries and whiskey mills, its murders, riots, and political corruption. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. This was a dangerous indulgence, for violent retribution was not uncommon. In February Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise.
When they arrived in Nevada, Clemens worked for Orion for a while, but thought he could make a fortune mining for silver or gold. Though he tried to strike it rich, Clemens failed and returned to journalism, this time as a reporter. In Clemens moved to San Francisco and worked for various newspapers. He gave his first public lecture in October and embarked on a lecture tour in the western states to make money and promote his career.
Clemens had a natural talent for telling stories and making speeches. He would lecture on and off for the rest of his life. In , Clemens set sail as a traveling correspondent on a grand tour of Europe and the Mideast for the San Francisco Alto California. His reports of this journey later became his first best-selling book, Innocents Abroad , published in They married in and soon settled in Hartford, Connecticut.
Together they had four children: a son, Langdon, who died as an infant, and three daughters—Susy, Clara, and Jean. It was at their house in Hartford that Clemens turned from journalism to writing the books and novels that made him famous. In he published Roughing It , an autobiographical account of his years in the West.
Clemens set both of these novels in his native Missouri and drew heavily on his boyhood memories of growing up in Hannibal. He examined American culture on the edge of the frontier and dealt seriously with such issues as slavery, poverty, and class differences. Within the Sampson Collection were a number of rare editions and foreign translations of Mark Twain novels. In , Clemens visited the University of Missouri, Columbia, and donated a twenty-two-volume edition of his collected works to the Society.
During the next two decades, the collection continued to grow slowly through purchases and gifts. Then, in , the Society purchased the fine Mark Twain library of books, over 1, cartoons, and clippings collected by Purd B. Wright of Kansas City. In , after the death of George A. The Society continued to add to the collection through gifts and purchases, and by the collection had grown to volumes and also contained scrapbooks and additional cartoons.
New items are still added to the collection, and by it had grown to over 1, volumes. Despite his great literary successes, Samuel Clemens was unlucky in business. He had a strong, recurrent desire to invest in products and projects that often failed, such as the Paige typesetter, an automatic typesetting machine.
In fact, Clemens did much of his writing and lecturing to pay off his debts. Then in , Clemens suffered the first of a series of devastating personal losses. During the next decade, Clemens would suffer the loss of his wife, Livy, in and his second daughter, Jean, in Samuel Clemens returned to the United States in He was greeted by a supportive public that admired his work.
In he traveled to Missouri for the last time to accept an honorary degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia. While in his home state, Clemens also visited St. Charles L. Twain sent salesmen all over the country to sell the work, which was offered as a two-volume set with a choice of three bindings.
Many of the salesmen were Civil War veterans. They wore their army uniforms to create sympathy for Grant, who had died just days after finishing his manuscript. Twain appreciated Grant's writing, and he praised the Memoirs sincerely. Of Grant he wrote, "this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.
Grant's memoirs won critical acclaim, and about , sets were sold. Twain was forced to write and lecture to pay off his debts, which he finally succeeded in doing.
The deaths of his wife and two daughters contributed to the deep sadness that Twain experienced in his later years. He died in Redding, Connecticut, in , with his autobiography unfinished. Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America.
Her work helped lay the foundation for modern codebreaking today. I n the summer of , hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies. By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead. The victim, Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges, was sleeping on a During a White House ceremony attended by James S. Brady, President Bill Clinton signs the Brady handgun-control bill into law. The law requires a prospective handgun buyer to wait five business days while the authorities check on his or her background, during which time the sale The book became a best-seller right away.
Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. In the On November 30, , President Harry S. Truman announces during a press conference that he is prepared to authorize the use of atomic weapons in order to achieve peace in Korea. The following day, his car—containing his wallet, some condoms, and an empty vodka bottle—was found abandoned in a remote area of Ormond Beach.
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